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2017/08

Twitter’s Selective Censorship Continues With /pol/ News Forever

The social media account for the politically incorrect imageboard /pol/, appropriately called /pol/ News Forever, was recently suspended for undisclosed reasons. The account owner, Levi Smith, has been keeping the nearly 100,000 followers up to date on the suspension, but he has not been able to find out why the account was suspended. Additionally, Twitter has made no pronouncement about the reasons for the suspension.

The suspension took place on August 14th, 2017. Smith informed his followers from his personal account about the account suspension and that he was unable to restore the /pol/ News Forever account but he was able to unlock his personal account.

As noted, even the backup account, /pol/ News United, was also suspended.

This comes just a day after Twitter permanently banned Sargon of Akkad from the social media service, following a suspension notice that went out a few days earlier.

The /pol/ News Network hasn’t been up for very long. Smith had taken to Twitter back on May 9th, 2017 to inform the social media metaverse that the account was back and would be providing alternative news and information that is either misrepresented or poorly represented by mainstream media news sources. It was essentially the social media news arm for the politically incorrect board on 4chan.

Some suspect that the recent suspension of the /pol/ News Forever account was due to its support of the Unite The Right march that took place in Charlottesville, Virgina. Smith and others from the /pol/ board had attended the march.

Following the events in Charlottesville, some online organizations have been actively announcing proactive measures to ban or remove groups that they claim have violated their terms of service, such as Discord.

As noted on Kotaku in Action, the gaming chat service has been shutting down Alt-Right groups and groups they claim that were associated with organizing events in Charlottesville. I did reach out to

Discord to ask if this wide-sweeping ban also included Antifa groups, but they haven’t responded as of the publishing of this article. If they decide to respond the article will be updated.

For now, Smith states that he will create a new affiliate “shortly” to resume posting as usual.

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