Following a late-night, profanity-laced, Twitter tirade directed at CNN anchors, Roger Stone Jr., a longtime confidant and associate of President Donald Trump has been suspended indefinitely from the social media platform.
Stone (who looks like a caricature of a villain from a Charles Dickens novel) was likely set off by reports from CNN that the first charges had been approved in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the President’s campaign staff and Russian agents during last year’s presidential election.
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In a Sunday email to Politico, Stone protested the ban and said that he was consulting with lawyers about taking legal action against Twitter.
“This is a strange way to do business and part and parcel of the systematic effort by the tech left to censor and silence conservative voices,” Stone wrote in an email quoted by POLITICO.
The language in Stone’s email is far more staid than the commentary Stone leveled at CNN anchor Don Lemon on Friday night. Stone reportedly took to the social media platform and called Lemon a “Piece of shit,” and “human excrement”, and wrote that the host must be “confronted, humiliated, mocked and punished”.
It’s not the first time that Stone, a political operative for the Republican party since his work with Richard M. Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) in the 1970s, has made vulgar attacks on Twitter. He does it all the time.
This time might have been a tweet too far for the messaging service, since users have publicly excoriated the service for its responses to harassment and its arbitrary enforcement policies.
In an email with Buzzfeed, a Twitter spokesperson referred to Twitter’s policy around harassment and abuse as a potential reason why the account may have been blocked.
But don’t worry too much about Twitter’s attempts at censure. Stone has at least two other accounts that he’s still actively tweeting from…. Perhaps another issue that Twitter might want to take a look at when it examines its enforcement policies.
He is also tweeting from @StoneColdTruth, which, aside from the irony, is quite sneaky. twitter.com/girlsreallyrul…
