The former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard has faced a belated backlash from social media companies. In 1999, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke predicted that the Internet would help give birth to a “coming white revolution”. The news media did not give him friendly coverage, he wrote on his website, but on the internet, he could reach supporters directly, starting a “chain reaction of racial enlightenment”. For the next 20 years, Duke, one of the most notorious hate group leaders in the US, was given free rein to spread his white supremacist message on one internet platform after another. Now, after years of protests and a surge of white supremacist terror attacks around the globe, social media companies are belatedly limiting Duke’s reach. Twitter said on Friday that it had permanently suspended his account, citing “repeated violations of the Twitter Rules on hateful conduct”. YouTube banned his account in June. Facebook banned Duke in 2018, the company said, more than a year after he participated in the violent white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia. Twitter’s decision to permanently ban Duke came more than a decade after Duke created his account, in 2009, and more than eight years after he started posting regularly, in 2012. He has tweeted tens of thousands of times, often weighing in on national events and sharing white supremacist and antisemitic conspiracies. He had more than 50,000 followers at the time his account was permanently suspended. Duke, who was a neo-Nazi in college, led a Ku Klux Klan group and later founded an organization called the “National Association for the Advancement of White People”.
via guardian: Twitter bans white supremacist David Duke after 11 years
siehe auch: Nazi Sympathizer and Ex-Klan Leader David Duke Banned by Twitter for Hate Speech. White supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has been permanently banned from the social media platform Twitter after repeatedly violating its rules against hate speech. The shutdown of hardcore Nazi sympathizer Duke’s Twitter feed follows a similar ban on his outpourings on YouTube in June. (…) Jonathan Greenblatt — the ADL’s chief executive — welcomed Twitter’s ban on Duke, taking to the same platform to state that “social platforms should be a place where all users can be free of the hate & harassment that Duke and his ilk regularly promote.”
