Canada’s most popular television show’s Twitter account was suspended some time in the early morning of Friday, May 24. While most English Canadians might not know it, Radio-Canada’s Tout le monde en parle has more than one million regular viewers every Sunday night.
If TLMEP can be suspended over a tweet that simply promoted an interview that many far-right tolls disagreed with, the implications for those of us who have opinions that challenge right-wing rhetoric are enormous. Progressive Twitter users are being shut down more and more for comments that are objectively not harassment or problematic. It seems that if enough people report a tweet, it’s enough to land you in Twitter jail.
It’s a wild inconvenience for a company to lose a Twitter account for a few hours or days because of coordinated and targeted right-wing harassment. But for those of us who rely on the platform to share our work, make connections and break the isolation of working alone, losing access to our Twitter accounts can be far more threatening to our livelihoods. We’re tethered to a website who is more interested in allowing the proliferation of vicious right-wing trolls than it is to protecting those of us who the trolls target.
And worse, the trolls know that they can win this game.
