Twitter reacted to a scathing report from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism this week by suspending several dozen accounts operated by white nationalists.
The report, which identified more than 60 accounts that had over 140,000 followers, suggested that Twitter had not done enough to purge voices it deemed beyond the pale of reasonable conversation, and the San Francisco-based tech company took action by the end of the week.
“The accounts in question were suspended for violating our policies in relation to violent extremism,” a Twitter representative told the Hill on Friday.
One of the accounts with the most followers belonged to Martin Sellner, the figurehead of the Identitarian Movement in Austria. Speaking to NBC News on Friday, Sellner called the move “censorship” against his freedom of speech.
“It is another act of censorship of freedom of speech,” Sellner said. “We are the only group really talking about mass immigration and population replacement. The mainstream has no answers to our question: Why should we accept becoming a minority in our own countries?”
The scrubbing of accounts comes amid renewed scrutiny regarding free speech on tech platforms. Facebook is reportedly reassessing its political advertisement policy in an effort to curb the spread of misinformation in an election year.
