Twitter wants you to know that you’re still SOL if you get a death threat — unless you’re President Donald Trump

Twitter’s communication team has been quick to respond to news of Donald Trump’s recent diagnosis of COVID-19 by first silently suspending users without explanation, and then quote tweeting journalist Jason Koebler to remind him that their rule replies to “*anyone*.” In his report for Vice, linked in his tweet, Koebler wrote:

“Twitter told Motherboard that users are not allowed to openly hope for Trump’s death on the platform and that tweets that do so “will have to be removed” and that they may have their accounts put into a “read only” mode. Twitter referred to an “abusive behavior” rule that’s been on the books since April.

“Content that wishes, hopes or expresses a desire for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against an individual is against our rules,” Twitter said in a statement. This rule will apparently apply to people who wish death on Trump, who is the single most powerful person in the world.”

But the ratio on the @Twittercomms response, specifically between the quote tweets and the actual retweets, tells a different story.

The quote tweets reveal account after account of violent and abusive threats that users reported to Twitter, only to be told the messages did not violate Twitter policy. Phoenix Calida (user @uppitynegress) was targeted for being a sex worker and sex worker rights activist.

Another user, @nerdjpg, describes death threats sent via Twitter that include their home address. Twitter did not suspend these accounts.

These stories are typical. As a digital ethnographer that has been studying social media platforms since 2009, it has been clear to me for years that Twitter, just like Facebook, targets politically marginalized people for censorship as a shortcut to creating a platform that appears “civil” to the majority of its users. By censorship, I specifically mean the functional outcome of prioritizing the perceptions of white over nonwhite users. Nina Monei (user @wildfonts) was censored as a direct result of racist abuse she experienced. As in the case of other lynching threats I have seen Black women endure on the platform, the threatening account remains active.

Twitter invokes the ideal of diversity in its branding, and Twitter users are indeed younger, and have higher education credentials. But Twitter is about 60% white (similar to the US population overall) and Twitter has demonstrated a commitment to defining race and racism according to the perspectives of that 60%. Like most tech companies, Twitter’s likely “teach to the middle” approach to developing community values simply reproduces the existing power structure by replicating very common, but also very incorrect, notions of racial violence. In other words, Twitter’s method of developing community norms can never be shifted by a minority of users. Therefore, as structured and branded, it will never reflect the experiences of precisely the most vulnerable and targeted people on the platform.

In particular, Twitter leadership has failed to recognize its negligence in the face of raced and gendered violence on its platform as racial violence in and of itself. Yet Twitter has continued to market itself as — and be celebrated by academic researchers — as platform that enables counter-publics.

Twitter is well aware of problems with racism, misogyny, fascism, antisemitism, and eugenics on its platform because thousands of users have been reporting these issues for over a decade and they have been covered by national and international media. Researchers and users continuously point out that Twitter’s policies replicate the same harms against the exact same groups. Twitter’s CEO and communications team respond to each critique with a a persistent, studied credulity that has devastated our news media ecosystem.

For better or worse, Twitter occupies a central role in American news media. It sets newsroom agendas and determines the pace of public debates. And it reliably censors precisely the populations whose perspectives journalists claim to be gleaning from skimming Twitter.

Twitter obscures its human operations with a lot of tech sparkle, but at its core, its support structure is giant queue operated by actual people. Those people have been ordered by their CEO, Jack Dorsey, to specifically address users that refer to the death of a specific public figure, Donald Trump. Even other public figures have not been directly mentioned by Twitter in relation to implementing Twitter’s supposed rules against violent rhetoric. In this context, every report about violence against Donald Trump is a priority in the queue over other reports of abuse.

This is concerning, when Twitter is a platform that is used to efficiently stalk, harass, threaten, and doxx (publicize sensitive personal information) a wide range of overlapping groups including domestic abuse victims, sex workers, trans people, queer people, immigrants, medical patients (by their providers), neurodivergent people, and visibly or vocally disabled people. I have personally observed this, and the resulting apathy from Twitter over nearly ten years of deliberate ethnographic investigation. Given that Amnesty National called Twitter a “Toxic Place for Women” in November 2018, Twitter has more than enough work to do about plausible death threats on its platform. How do they even have time to condescend to their users about death wishes related to a communicable disease for which he is receiving the best treatment money and power can buy? One imagines.

The predictable and predicted result of Twitter’s repeated failure to acknowledged its central role in enabling the surveillance and abuse of marginalized women is that Twitter is now utterly unable to mediate a cesspool of disinformation, hatred, and algorithmic decontextualization that the alt-right has been training to manipulate since Jessie Daniels wrote Cyber Racism about StormF**nt in 2009. In this early work, which Daniels has since expanded, she demonstrates that gender ideology is central to Nazi recruitment. Taking women’s accounts seriously for the past decades would have been an easy shortcut to understanding disinformation on the web, and this has been widely known and widely silenced since GamerGate.

Moreover, since news rooms have incorporated Twitter into their routines, journalists big platforms on Twitter have little incentive to challenge policies that continuously produce big “gotcha” stories. Inevitably, Twitter apologizes, promises to take our critiques under advisement.

Meanwhile the abuse, including gaming the report system to get victims suspended, continues out of view of most of the public and Twitter continues to be the media foil to sinister Facebook. It’s time for that to stop.