Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed piece at the New York Daily News. The piece starts this way:
Twitter has locked my account. I can’t post anything or read messages from other users. The reason? In March, I tweeted that the perpetrator of the New Zealand mosque shooting was “a socialist, environmentalist, who hates capitalists & free trade.” I also wrote that the killer believed his attack would “lead to more gun control” in New Zealand and the United States.
We noted last week that Twitter locked John Lott’s account because of it deemed a tweet to be in violation of the company’s rules. In Lott’s appeal, he noted that Twitter had not offered an explanation for its action. As can be seen from the screenshot of its email, Twitter has continued to provide no explanation.…
Demographics of Mass Public Shooters, Social Media Censorship
Dr. John Lott has an op-ed at the Daily Caller about the social media bias that we have faced at Facebook.
…There are lots of ways that social media outlets can bias political debates. We have heard of everything from accounts being closed down to deciding what stories are listed as trending.
We have previously run into trouble with Twitter censoring our activity. Gavin McGinnis recently posted a Tweet linking to some of our research correcting false statements made by Vox.com on guns. But Twitter provided the following warning:
So what does “sensitive material” mean? Apparently, Twitter says that sensitive material is “abusive and offensive” material. …
Yesterday, we put up a post on the CPRC website noting that a law-abiding citizen had stopped the mass public shooting at the Texas church. We were putting this out hours before the national media was picking up on this important story. Dr. Lott had put this up on his Twitter feed and tried to get some more attention for it by paying for a Twitter Ad campaign. …
