Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has a bad habit of endorsing the wrong people -- i.e., coronavirus conspiracy theorists -- when they get banned from social media, downplaying or outright censoring the evidence that they were banned from social media for good reason. The MRC took that step again in a June 22 post by Alexander Hall:
Twitter has censored British conservative commentator Katie Hopkins for reportedly mocking a threat of violence by one of her detractors. Twitter, being Twitter, decided she was the dangerous one.
Hopkins “received a permanent ban from Twitter for a tweet she made in response to a threat against her,” Sky News reported. A Twitter spokesperson allegedly claimed that Hopkins’s suspension was intended “to keep Twitter safe.” In another statement from Twitter, according to The Guardian, Hopkins’s “account has been permanently suspended for violations of our hateful conduct policy.”
Twitter’s Hateful Conduct Policy states that users “may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.” If remains unclear exactly what protected human group Hopkins could have been insulting by referring to the genitalia of primates.
Hopkins explained to Sky News that she “used the phrase hung like a baboon in response to a threat of a sexual nature of violence against me.” Twitter reportedly told her that she, by mocking a threat made against her, had committed “violations of our hateful conduct policy.”
On her Instagram account Hopkins also made note that “hung like a baboon” was a reference to the history-themed sitcom “Blackadder” starring Rowan Atkinson and Brian Blessed.
As we've documented, Hopkins is sometimes described as the "British Ann Coulter," with all the hatred of brown people and Muslims that this description means. She's so hateful that the notoriously right-wing Daily Mail dropped Hopkins as a columnist after she called for a "final solution" after a bombing in Manchester by a radical Islamist killed 22 people. She also was ordered to pay $164,000 in damages and legal costs to a food writer whom she libeled by falsely claiming she supported the defacing of a war memorial.
Hall also deliberately softens the incident that got her banned from Twitter. Contrary to Hopkins' description, which Hall swallows whole without bothering to fact-check, she made that "hung like a baboon" comment to a black rugby player who called her "f***ing toxic" -- in other words, not a "threat of a sexual nature of violence" -- in response to her reported mocking of Black Lives Matter protests. A couple weeks earlier, Hewitt had described the racism he suffered as a child growing up in Wales as the son of Welsh mother and a Jamacian father.
But Hall isn't interested in telling the full truth. He'd much rather promote a hateful racist and Islamophobe's next venture:
While Twitter appears to be resolute in its decision to purge Hopkins, she has chosen to instead embrace an entirely new platform.
She closed her Instagram video by encouraging her followers to follow her on Parler instead under the name “@KTHopkins,” identical to the handle on her former Twitter account.
Parler, of course, being the place right-wingers go when they get kicked off Twitter for being too offensive. Hall didn't tell his readers about that, either.
(Image: South Wales Argus)
