Last week in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a jury found 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty in a now-infamous self-defense/homicide trial. Yet even though the full procedures of our criminal justice system have vindicated Rittenhouse’s shooting of three people at a riot last year, the woke censors at TikTok still apparently view the basic argument that he acted in self-defense as beyond the pale.
When I posted a brief video defending Rittenhouse on TikTok Sunday, the platform removed it — bizarrely claiming my remarks violate its “harassment and bullying” policy.
My video simply argued Rittenhouse’s case exposed the hypocrisy of many on the Left who regularly fight for criminal justice reform but threw their support for fair criminal procedures out the window in the case. Here’s the text of my remarks:
“Hakeem Jeffries, a progressive congressman, literally tweeted while the trial was still going on: ‘Lock up Kyle Rittenhouse and throw away the key.’ And he’s the same guy that rails against mass incarceration — and I agree with him sometimes — but now, before the trial was even over, they were calling for this guy to be locked up and throw away the key … like they’ve already reached their conclusion. And they lied about it being a ‘white supremacy’ thing when it’s a white dude that shot other white people.
You don’t have to either think that he’s a hero who did everything right and made amazing decisions or he’s an evil white supremacist who should go to jail. The truth is, I would never let my teenager go to a riot zone with a weapon — that was a bad decision to make — but in the moment, he defended himself. He wasn’t some mass shooter white supremacist, and he should be acquitted.”
What part of that constitutes “bullying” or “harassment” in any form? And this bizarre censorship decision by TikTok wasn’t an error or mistake. I appealed the removal of my video, and my appeal was denied.
— Brad Polumbo ??⚽️ ?️? (@brad_polumbo) November 22, 2021
To be clear, I do believe that as a platform, TikTok should have the legal right to remove content it does not want to host. But it’s still perfectly fair game to criticize the company when it makes bad decisions, inaccurately enforces its own stated terms of service, and shuts down legitimate public debate on pressing issues of the day.
The Rittenhouse case is a national news story with profound societal ramifications for U.S. principles such as self-defense, criminal justice, and civil liberties. If TikTok refuses to allow conservative arguments on such a crucial matter, even after a neutral jury vindicates the pro-Rittenhouse position, it can’t claim to be an open and robust platform. At that point, it’s little more than a woke echo chamber and liberal disinformation bubble.
This discrepancy is made particularly glaring by the extreme left-wing content routinely allowed on the platform. As I cover in my TikTok reaction series for Rightly on YouTube, viral TikToks are allowed to joke about violence against conservatives and even (satirically, I hope?) advocate for the cannibalization of rich people. I’m not even saying these videos should be censored — but to allow this content to circulate while taking down legitimate conservative arguments in the name of “harassment and bullying” is inconsistent and hypocritical.
Still, at the end of the day, taking down one TikTok is hardly the end of the world. But this frustrating affair is part of Big Tech’s broader trend of silencing and suppressing right-of-center arguments on pressing political issues — and in that, it’s concerning indeed.
UPDATE:
I appreciate it, but this doesn’t solve the problem.
Most people don’t have a blue checkmark and big accounts to RT them to get attention and get absurd censorship decisions reversed.
They need to address their bias so this kind of insanity doesn’t happen again.
— Brad Polumbo ??⚽️ ?️? (@brad_polumbo) November 22, 2021
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and a Washington Examiner contributor. Subscribe to his YouTube channel or email him at [email protected].
