(Brightpress.org) – Journalist and author Andy Ngo was temporarily locked out of his Twitter account Tuesday evening, February 7th for sharing screenshots of tweets by left-wing extremists calling for violence at conservative events.
Antifa from Eugene, OR, encouraged violence at a Turning Point USA campus event in a series of tweets screen-shotted and shared by Ngo. The text on one of the flyers suggests things like “leave your phone at home,” and “bash the fash.” The latter is a literal call for violence against anyone deemed ‘fash’ by antifa. They have a history of labeling anyone with whom they disagree politically as far-right extremists deserving of physical violence.
The TP event in question featured black speakers Stephen Davis, and Anthony Watson, showing that Antifa drones have no problem deploying violence to silence minority voices when it suits them.
Ngo’s thread reminded readers that one of their members, Charlie Landeros, opened fire on school resource officers and was killed during a 2019 encounter with police. Landeros preferred gender-neutral pronouns, by the way.
Ngo’s work includes real-time exposure of violent content which deserves to be removed. That was one of the reasons given ultimately for censoring his posts. Twitter claimed that his coverage of tweets they need to remove was hampering their ability to do so. However, Ngo’s coverage keeps an archive of the material in question as well as offers criticism and context to the naked calls for violence, giving readers a perspective not contained in the original material.
Three other tweets were taken down, including one that encouraged violence at a Jordan Peterson speaking event in Minneapolis and another suggesting “fascism has only ever been defeated by armed conflict.”
Ngo himself pointed out that restricting journalists’ ability to share evidence of wrongdoing could have a chilling effect on the practice, making violence more likely, not less. He also added that sympathetic accounts often coordinate mass reports (platform manipulation is against Twitter’s TOS) in order to censor folks like Ngo who critically expose their calls for chaos.
Ngo further suggested Twitter needs to update its policies if it treats critics who point out the violent content the same as those who generate it.
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