Twitter has banned the notorious white supremacist David Duke, pursuing a new policy opposed to the hate speech links presented earlier this month. “The account he referred to has been permanently suspended for repeated violations of Twitter’s hate behavior regulations,” a Twitter spokesman told Engadget. “This coercive measure is consistent with our recently updated recommendation on destructive links.”
Duke has been expelled from duty before, albeit very temporarily. Earlier this month, Twitter defended its continued presence by noting that “lately you are not a member of the KKK,” according to Gizmodo. This is despite the fact that Duke uses the platform to describe black people as “savages” and to call other Jewish people “degenerate dirt.”
Since then, Twitter has updated its policies by banning links that sell “hate content.” He did not specify what links might have led to Duke’s ongoing ban, but noted that his policies prohibited the promotion of violence or threats of attack to others based on his devoted affiliation, race, ethnicity and other categories. Other figures permanently suspended on the site come with British far-right activists Katie Hopkins and Milo Yiannopoulis.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Duke is “a figure of the radical American right, a neo-Nazi, longtime Klan leader and now a foreign spokesman for Holocaust denial.” The organization notes that many white supremacist figures like Richard B. Spencer are still strangely on the site.
“David Duke is just the beginning, but there are many more,” Keegan Hankes, SPLC’s interim research director, said in a message to Engadget. “We’ve noticed how difficult social media is to drive the spread of hate and how top-generation corporations do too little to restrict the spread until it’s too late.”
Update 31/07/2020 10:30 AM ET: The article has been updated with comments from the Hate Group Monitoring Organization, Southern Poverty Law Center.