Mitch McConnell Campaign Twitter Suspension

Overview

Mitch McConnell Campaign Twitter Lockdown refers to the controversy regarding Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's campaign account, who published a video of protestors threatening McConnell outside of his house. Twitter maintains that because the video contains threats of physical violence, they locked McConnell's account until the video was removed, giving cause for conservative groups, who have long alleged Twitter another social media companies of unfairly moderating conservative users, to further accusations of political bias.

Background

On August 5th, 2019, Twitter^[1] user @emrazz tweeted a photograph of several young men wearing Team Mitch t-shirts grabbing and mocking a cardboard cutout of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They captioned the tweet, "Pictured: seven young white men in 'Team Mitch' T-shirts, gathered round a distressed looking cardboard @AOC, groping and kissing her. The caption, 'break me off a piece of that.' Future federal judges of America." Within four days, the tweet received more than 32,000 likes and 10,000 retweets (shown below, left).

That day, Ocasio-Cortez retweeted the post.^[2] She added the caption, "Hey @senatemajldr – these young men look like they work for you. Just wanted to clarify: are you paying for young men to practice groping & choking members of Congress w/ your payroll, or is this just the standard culture of #TeamMitch? Thanks." Within four days, the tweet received more than 196,000 likes and 54,000 retweets (shown below, right).

The following day, Team Mitch's Twitter account tweeted a video of protestors outside of McConnell's home. In the video, protestors can be heard mocking McConnell, saying that they wished he broke his neck and telling someone to stab a McConnell voodoo doll in the heart. They wrote, Last night, an angry left-wing mob of Amy McGrath supporters stormed Senator McConnell’s Louisville home screaming obscenities and hoping someone would ‘just stab the motherfucker in the heart.’" The tweet received more than 1,400 likes and 700 retweets in three days (shown below).

The Twitter account followed the video by tweeting, "Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and liberal Twitter personalities are trying to dox some underage kids for taking a photo with a cutout at the Fancy Farm political picnic and are cheering on thousands of accounts calling for Senator McConnell to 'break his neck' […] These threats go far beyond a political cartoon or a broken shoulder, they are serious calls to physical violence and we’ve alerted law enforcement." Within three days, the tweet received more than 2,200 likes and 920 retweets (shown below).

After the video was published, Twitter locked the Team Mitch account, claiming that the video violated their violent threats policy.

Developments

Conservative Response

McConnell's campaign manager told The Hill,^[3] "We firmly believe that if a platform allows #massacremitch to trend but locks our account because we posted threats made against him, there is something deeply wrong with that platform."

In an interview with WHAS, McConnell claimed to be in a "major war" with the platform. He said, "The point that we wanted to make is Twitter is perfectly fine with carrying Massacre Mitch, which is obviously an invitation to violence, but when those kinds of words are directed at me they shut us down."

Twitter Response

On August 9th, Twitter^[4] unlocked Team Mitch's account, after some prominent Republicans threatened to boycott the platform. In a series of tweets, Twitter said, "After multiple appeals from affected users and Leader McConnell’s team confirming their intent to highlight the threats for public discussion, we have reviewed this case more closely."

Search Interest

External References