The Slatest

Twitter Inexplicably Lifts Ban on Openly Racist White Nationalist Leader Richard Spencer

Richard Spencer at an event at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas, on Tuesday.

Spencer Selvidge/Reuters

Less than a month after a wave of account suspensions evidently targeted at “alt-right” figures, Twitter has reinstated the account of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. From the Washington Post:

On Saturday, Twitter said that Spencer’s account had been restored—and that, despite widespread assumptions that Spencer was banned for violating the site’s prohibition on “hateful conduct,” or harassment, he was actually booted from the platform for violating its policy against having multiple, overlapping accounts.

The accounts of Spencer’s “think-tank,” the National Policy Institute, and his web magazine, Radix Journal, have not been reinstated. At the time of Spencer’s suspensions, Twitter also removed the accounts of several alt-right figures including Ricky Vaughn and Pax Dickinson and issued a statement saying its rules “prohibit violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct, and multiple account abuse.”

The grounds given for Saturday’s reinstatement mean Twitter did not find that Spencer, an open racist who has tweeted enthusiastically in favor of eugenics and discrimination, has been engaging in “hateful conduct” by its standards.

Twitter has long been criticized for its tolerance of hateful and abusive speech, criticisms that have only become more relevant as the Trump campaign has promoted and emboldened some of the web’s foulest and most racist voices. The social media service banned alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, for instance, only after he spearheaded a high-profile campaign of harassment against Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones this past July. Spencer has since become the alt-right’s most prominent figure following a series of lengthy mainstream-media profiles and the November National Policy Institute conference at which several guests made Hitler salutes at the end of Spencer’s boisterous closing speech. With his reinstatement already creating a backlash, it’s likely that this story is still developing.