Meghan Murphy had about 25,000 followers on Twitter when she was blocked from the social media platform. She received notice of the ban on Nov. 23, 2018, four days after Twitter forced her to delete a viral tweet about its censorship.
Twitter’s reason for pulling her from the platform had been an earlier November tweet, in which Murphy wrote “him” in reference to a blogger identifying as a woman. Twitter argued it violated its Hateful Conduct Policy, which includes misgendering.
“The one thing that Twitter could do, because they weren’t able to shut me up, was to take away this platform in an attempt to prevent me from making a living from engaging in these conversations,” Murphy tells me. “I just find it very creepy that Twitter is trying to impose what really is the modern version of Newspeak on the public.”
Now, she’s suing Twitter.
Although she’s drawing support from conservative circles, the Canadian feminist is no right-winger; she says she has “always been on the Left” and she supports both socialism and abortion.
“I do think this is a nonpartisan issue,” she says. “I mean, we’re talking about free speech, and that’s a concept that everyone should support regardless of whether or not they’re on the Left or the Right.”
Via her website, Feminist Current, and, previously, her Twitter account, Murphy has made a living by sharing her ideas, including the claim that people should be referred to based on their biological sex. Thanks to online platforms, she’s invited dialogue on the subject. But Twitter no longer wants to listen.
Murphy’s lawsuit doesn’t hang on the grounds that Twitter isn’t allowed to arbitrarily choose what speech it permits. Its Hateful Conduct Policy is vague enough to allow that. But Twitter slipped in its language about “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” with no announcement, Murphy argues, and then implemented the new policy retroactively.
Twitter doesn’t hide the fact that it wants to become the arbiter of good speech. CEO Jack Dorsey said this month that the platform cannot “afford to take a neutral stance anymore.” When asked on a podcast about Murphy’s ban, he said, “I certainly don’t believe it was that one tweet.” It wasn’t. It also included two October tweets, one saying merely, “Men aren’t women.”
As a manager of hate, though, Twitter isn’t doing a very good job. Murphy says she has received countless violent threats about which Twitter has done nothing. “There’s plenty of illegal activity that happens on Twitter that Twitter claims it’s unable to do anything about,” she says. If pornography, sex trafficking, and terrorist accounts prosper through Twitter, why not a political debate?
John Milton, speaking some 350 years before Twitter, addressed a similar issue in his polemic against censorship, “Areopagitica.” He argued that rather than save the common folk from dangerous speech, restrictions on information rob them of an exercise in intellectual and moral virtue. “Let [truth] and Falsehood grapple,” he wrote. “Who ever knew Truth put to the [worse], in a free and open encounter.”
Twitter is, as Murphy puts it, “our modern public square.” So why should we not speak freely within it? That’s the question she and her lawsuit ask. And it’s what Twitter must now answer.
