Twitter briefly suspended a right-wing grifting duo Wednesday after they ran afoul of Twitter’s expanded coronavirus guidelines banning “content that increases the chance that someone contracts or transmits the virus,” including denials “of expert guidance” and “misleading content purporting to be from experts or authorities.”
“The only way we can become immune to the environment; we must be out in the environment,” the duo known as Diamond and Silk (Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson) said in a since-deleted tweet to their more than 1.4 million followers. “Quarantining people inside of their houses for extended periods will make people sick!”
The Diamond and Silk account was soon locked by Twitter, and the anti-quarantine tweet was removed.
Later that same day, Twitter appeared to give back control of the account to the alleged right-wing personalities, who then immediately tweeted a conspiracy theory involving Dr. Anthony Fauci and “Black people” being used as “Guinea pigs” for vaccine experiments.
“Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx have made it clear that COVID-19 severely impacts African Americans,” they said in a tweet that apparently does not run afoul of Twitter’s guidelines against coronavirus misinformation. “If they think they are about to make Black people the Guinea pigs for their vaccines experiments, they have another thing coming.”
It makes sense, based on Twitter’s own explanation, that it would lock the Diamond and Silk account over the anti-quarantine tweet. It is also consistent, based on Twitter’s explanation of its guidelines, why Fox News’s Laura Ingraham and President Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, would have their accounts locked because of their tweets making clearly false claims (such as “100% effective”) about the drug hydroxychloroquine.
But what about all the other coronavirus misinformation shared on Twitter, including this Diamond and Silk tweet about black people being used as vaccine “guinea pigs”? What of the panicky coronavirus conspiracies and outright lies shared by mainline left-wing commentators and even high-ranking Chinese officials?
One could, in fact, argue that panicky conspiracy tweets do not place people at a higher risk of transmitting the virus than, say, tweets advising against quarantine. But lies and unhinged conspiracy theories from professional commentators and government officials do contribute to the general air of panic and uncertainty surrounding the virus. This could lead to people taking desperate and possibly fatal measures to protect themselves. Why not just go ahead and ban these tweets, too?
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, for example, suggested this week that the healthcare officials tasked with leading the administration’s pandemic response intentionally falsified their initial death toll projections just so Trump could brag later that they came in under initial estimates.
“The most cynical interpretation of all this,” Hayes said, playing the classic “I’m just asking questions” game, “one I can’t quite bring myself to accept, is they rolled out the model showing 100k deaths after they knew it would be less than that so they could anchor everyone to that [number] and take a [victory] lap when ‘only’ tens of thousands died.”
Based on other tweets being suppressed for minimizing the virus as an overblown panic, how exactly does this not qualify as a conspiracy theory that minimizes the virus? Hayes is suggesting that the problem is just an exaggeration prompted by a malevolent Trump administration conspiracy, is he not?
Elsewhere at MSNBC, Hayes’s colleague, Rachel Maddow, promoted Chinese propaganda claiming China’s new case numbers have remained essentially flat since late February.
“We don’t just have the highest number of cases in total,” she said in reference to the United States, “we have the highest number of new cases each day, by far.”
We’re the pink line at the top there.
We don’t just have the highest number of cases in total, we have the highest number of *new* cases each day, by far.
New today from From FT’s data visualization shop @jburnmurdoch pic.twitter.com/W3FXda0kKH
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) April 8, 2020
That would be a great point — if we had any reason to trust the numbers out of China. Call it a crazy hunch, but that graph looks a bit fishy. The regime that claims only 200 civilians and “security personnel” were killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre may also be lying about its coronavirus case and death count.
Twitter has taken no action against Maddow’s tweet, even though it involves the spread of an obvious falsehood produced by the Chinese Communist Party. And speaking of foreign agitprop, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian’s tweet claiming the U.S. military brought the coronavirus to Wuhan has not been removed by Twitter. His tweet claiming the virus has been “been here in America for awhile” has similarly gone unchallenged by the social media platform’s censors.
The best defense Twitter has for this lack of enforcement consistency is that the Hayes, Maddow, and Zhao tweets likely will not lead to physical harm or transmission, whereas tweets praising hydroxychloroquine or tweets advising people to break quarantine could. And it’s not very convincing. If Twitter’s goal is to stanch the flow of coronavirus misinformation, they ought to go consistent, or else go home.
