Twitter has permanently suspended Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account. I have no use for MTG and, although I didn’t follow it closely, I’m sure her account was odious, dumb, and full of misleading information. That doesn’t necessarily distinguish itself from many Twitter accounts in good standing, though, and some of the statements that led to her initial “strikes” prior to the ban appear to have been factually correct, if unwelcome to keepers of the elite consensus.
Here is the New York Times on the reason for one of those strikes:
Ms. Greene’s tweet was “labeled in line with our Covid-19 misleading information policy,” Trenton Kennedy, a Twitter spokesman, said in an emailed statement. “The account will be in read-only mode for a week due to repeated violations of the Twitter Rules.”
In a statement circulated online, Ms. Greene said: “I have vaccinated family who are sick with Covid. Studies and news reports show vaccinated people are still getting Covid and spreading Covid.”
Now, she’s said plenty of indefensible things about the vaccines, but this isn’t one of them.
The problems with the honchos of Twitter weighing in to adjudicate such questions are that: (1) They are biased; (2) much of what they think they know isn’t true; and (3) regardless, what we know about responses to the pandemic and other contested matters is often in flux.
Stephen Miller made the last point well here:
A Twitter ban offense 6 months ago. https://t.co/YQleJIFLUn
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) January 2, 2022