Richard Spencer Back on Twitter — Ban Had Nothing To Do With Hate Speech

Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Richard Spencer, the white supremacist leader of the so-called ‘alt-right,’ is Tweeting again — after Twitter reinstated his personal account.
I’m back. pic.twitter.com/ngfq4aHWtc
— Richard ? Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) December 11, 2016
It turns out the social media platform didn’t bounce Spencer, the self-described ‘Karl Marx of the alt-right,’ for spewing hatred against Jews and others and promoting a white state in America.
Actually it took action against him for the more prosaic infraction of having too many overlapping accounts.
Spencer vowed to try to get his other accounts, including @radix and @altright back up soon too. But that might be a long shot given Twitter’s code of conduct prohibiting individuals from having multiple accounts.
It wasn’t clear why Spencer was deemed to have not violated Twitter’s ban on hate speech. Several prominent alt-right leaders have been banned in recent weeks as neo-Nazis and white supremacist take on a bigger public role after the election of President-elect. Trump.
Spencer, who has earned a reputation as a skilled orator, made headlines last week when he silenced a Texas rabbi by comparing his brand of white supremacy to Zionism.
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