Several prominent antifascist organizers and journalists have had their accounts suspended in the past week, after right-wing operatives appealed directly to Musk to ban them and far-right internet trolls flooded Twitter’s complaints system with false reports about terms of service violations.
As the Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin noted on Twitter, the suspended users include
Chad Loder, an antifascist researcher whose open-source investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot led to the identification and arrest of a masked Proud Boy who attacked police officers. The account of video journalist
Vishal Pratap Singh, who
reports on far-right protests in Southern California, has also been suspended.
Among the other prominent accounts suspended were the
Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in North Texas, and CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that has published and distributed anarchist and anti-authoritarian zines, books, posters, and podcasts since the mid-1990s.
Loder also said that some of the right’s criticism of content moderation decisions made by pre-Musk Twitter was fair. “I also agree that Twitter shouldn’t have censored the Hunter Biden laptop story,” Loder said. “We just don’t want outright Nazis posting our home addresses.”