Twitter restricts Marjorie Taylor Greene after tweets about trans people and Nashville shooting
Georgia Republican made unfounded claims about transgender people and terrorism
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Your support makes all the difference.Twitter temporarily limited certain tweets from the official account of representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, after the Georgia Republican made unfounded claims about the Nashville school shooting being related to “Antifa” and “trans-terrorism”.
“Yesterday, my official Twitter account was temporarily suspended for warning about Antifa’s Trans Day of Vengeance in front of the Supreme Court,” she wrote on Twitter on Wednesday on her reopened government account.
On Tuesday, Ms Greene shared a screenshot from her personal account, showing a notice from Twitter describing how it had temporarily limited her official page’s access to the site for violating Twitter rules.
In a tweet on Tuesday from her personal account, the Republican accused the site of attempting to “whitewash the incitement of politically motivated violence” because it took down a previous post.
The previous post described the “Trans Day of Vengeance,” a protest planned for April in Washington and claimed, “people need to know about the threat they face from Antifa & trans-terrorism”.
Audrey Hale, the gunman in the Nashville shooting, was reportedly a transgender man who used he/him pronouns. Police have not described any link between Hale and antifa, or between Hale’s gender identity and the violence in Nashville.
In a reply to Ms Greene, Twitter spokesperson Ella Irwin confirmed that some of the Republican’s media had been “restricted,” according to Mediaite.
Ms Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, said in a tweet later on Tuesday that Twitter removed Ms Greene’s posts featuring the poster for the Day of Vengeance event, over fears it could incite violence.
“We do not support tweets that incite violence irrespective of who posts them. ‘Vengeance’ does not imply peaceful protest,” the company official said.
Tsukuru Fors, a co-founder of the Trans Radical Activist Network, told a socialist website, “We are calling for Trans Day of Vengeance, instead of Trans Day of Visibility, because ‘visibility’ alone is no longer enough”.
“The right-wing fascists have unleashed a misinformation campaign upon our community by creating narratives that we are a danger to society,” Fors added. “They like to say that we are sexual predators and violent radicals, when, in fact, the only thing that’s dangerous about us is the fact that we are a threat to the binary systems that uphold the patriarchal, white-supremacist and capitalist power structure.”
On Wednesday, Ms Green used her official congressional account to tweet: “Since the school closures, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in trans identifying children, which is something that was not normal nor common many years before this, and I think that’s completely devastating.”
Three of her earlier tweets on the account were not visible, with messages saying they had “violated the Twitter Rules”.
On Tuesday night, Ms Greeene posted to her personal account that “Christoper Wray and the FBI must investigate the Nashville trans shooter”.
As The Independent has reported, Republican members of Congress and prominent far-right voices have seized on the fatal shooting of three nine-year-old children and three school employees in Nashville to promote legislation targeting transgender people and bans on gender-affirming healthcare, as well as to launch attacks on trans people more broadly.
Ms Greene, who has proposed federal legislation to outlaw gender-affirming care for trans youth, was among them.
She said, “everyone can stop blaming guns now” after the shooting.
There have been at least 129 other mass killings so far this year.
New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticised Ms Greene’s “absolutely disgusting” remarks, telling The Independent that the Georgia Republican “should be looking into a mirror as to why she’s defending and posing with the same weapons that are being used to kill children, teachers and educators”.
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