I saw a retweet complaining: “Twitter suspended the RC Cola twitter account over this tweet yet racists and other Rubes can post anything!” It got my attention because, like the retweeter, I too thought that sounded awfully hypocritical.
But *unlike* the retweeter, I decided to dig a little deeper to find out more, because it didn’t quite sound right. It didn’t pass the “smell test” so to speak. It doesn’t make sense that Twitter would shut down the account of a major brand just for mentioning covfefe.
It turns out that the RC Cola account in question was in fact a fake “parody” account and not in any way affiliated with the real RC Cola, which is owned by Dr. Pepper Snapple.
The account was only suspended because (presumably) the covfefe tweet happened to be the one that got enough publicity to bring the account to the attention of the Dr. Pepper Snapple corporate overlords, which stepped in to put a halt to the rather obvious trademark infringement.
The reason that Twitter doesn’t deactivate racists, etc. has nothing to do with ethics or politics, it’s simply that the racists don’t violate trademarks.
Also, incidentally, Twitter has no obligation to stop racist tweets, and their rules specifically “ensure that people feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs.” We might not like it, but racism falls under “diverse opinions and beliefs.” Only “violent threats” would prompt Twitter to take action. (So for example Bender could tweet “Humans are dumb meatbags” all day long, but he might get in trouble for saying, “Kill all humans.”)
