The @iwpchi Twitter account has once again been censored by Twitter for no good reason at all. This is about the fourth or fifth time our account has been shut down by Twitter for alleged violations of the “Twitter Rules” – “rules” that stand in total violation of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. It doesn’t matter at all if 99.9999% of our Tweets do not violate the “Twitter Rules”: even one failure to adhere to the COMPLETELY SUBJECTIVE “Twitter Rules” “justifies” terminating the ability of a fledgling political party like ours from participation in one of the most prominent public political forums in existence. How VERY convenient this is for the capitalist class micro-minority to have corporate censors doing what state and national legislatures are legally PREVENTED from doing thanks to the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights!
We have posted literally *tens of thousands* of Tweets since 2012 without violating the sacred “Twitter Rules”; yet if some political opponent of ours submits a complaint to Twitter about the content of even just *one* of our Tweets our account is summarily shut down and we are denied any legitimate opportunity to appeal the censorship. Usually we’re not even told what it was that we supposedly did to “deserve” the suspension of our account. In Silicon Valley the legal due process rights of US citizens have been overthrown and replaced by “Twitter Rules” under which accused persons are judged to be guilty until proven innocent – and then denied any semblance of legal due process!
This is what we were shut down for this time:
Sick and tired of the idiotic paternalism of Twitter’s automated censorship methods, we decided to try to establish a new account just to see if it would be possible to do so. We set up a bogus email account at gmx.com and then proceeded to set up a new Twitter account.
As soon as our account was created we received the following entreaties from Twitter suggesting we follow these pro-Democratic Party accounts, starting with @JoeBiden and working the way down through the leading #DemocraticParty shills:
We immediately took screenshots of this blatantly political pro-#DemocraticParty propaganda and then we proceeded to publish our first Tweet on the website. We did not “follow” any of the Democratic Party Twitter accounts that were suggested to us. Immediately, our account was locked and we were forced to either submit a telephone number or have our account locked out indefinitely.
What is this if not the most blatant political censorship in the history of the USA? Would we have had our account locked out immediately if we had “followed” the @JoeBiden account?
Obviously, the censorious swine running Twitter have serious objections to the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and especially to the right of free speech which is legally considered to be an “inalienable right” of every citizen in the USA (subject only to very limited restrictions that have been worked out through the legal system over the past 240 years).
The working class of the USA simply cannot allow the US Constitution and Bill of Rights to be superseded by the idiotic “Twitter Rules” promulgated by Silicon Valley billionaires! If Twitter continues to repudiate the Constitutional rights of US citizens to speak their minds freely on a corporate website whose services were created and launched from the USA and that were ostensibly set up to provide the citizens of the US and the world a free online forum for discussion of every topic under the sun, then we say Twitter needs to be brought under the legal formulae that regulate every other public utility and that require those utilities to provide full service to every US citizen regardless of race, creed, color or political opinion.
Of course as revolutionary Trotskyists we understand that the free speech rights of workers will never be protected under the class rule of the capitalist class. Only after capitalism is overthrown and a revolutionary socialist workers state established can the working class attain true free speech rights that will be truly “inalienable”. But that doesn’t mean that the working class has to stupidly submit to being muzzled by the billionaire scum at Twitter or any other capitalist enterprise. The working class supermajority has the power to put a permanent end to every attempt made by the capitalist microminority to regulate what the working class is “allowed” to think and to discuss! This censorship of working-class political speech must end right now!
All social media organizations must be forced to adhere to the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights when it comes to the inalienable right of workers to freely speak our minds – no matter how objectionable our ideas are to any member of the capitalist class! We are not the slaves of our capitalist masters – and we will not stand by idly as we are gagged by Silicon Valley shitweasels who think that they have the “right” to overthrow the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights!
—IWPCHI