Twitter's Suspension of "Libs of Tik Tok" Doesn't Make Sense

Recently, Twitter suspended one of its accounts, "Libs of Tik Tok." Twitter suspending accounts it considers "controversial" isn't out of the ordinary - but this particular 12-hour suspension outraged many on the political right, as well as many free-speech advocates.

Twitter reportedly suspended the account for "hateful conduct." But there's one pretty big problem: the "conduct" on the Libs of Tik Tok Twitter account was just reposted Tik Tok videos in which far-left-leaning people (often teachers) said incredibly weird (and occasionally relatively-disturbing) things.

One example of the sort of video that can be found on the Libs of Tik Tok Twitter account is below. As you'll see, there's no editing done, it's just a duplication of the original Tik Tok video that was then posted to Twitter. That said, it's also a relatively good representation of the typical personality in the videos, as many of the Tik Tok teacher-personalities often admit to talking to their students about topics that the students' parents may disapprove of.

Regardless of how about what Libs of Tik Tok does, or where you fall on the political compass, we should all agree that suspending an account for "hateful conduct" when all it does is repost videos of other people talking about themselves - regardless of the subject - is utterly ridiculous. To claim that the conduct of the Libs ok Tik Tok Twitter account was hateful for just reposting videos also doesn't make sense in this context, because "Libs of Tik Tok" could just as easily have been the name of a liberal Tik Tok curation account where reposted videos is the content curated for a niche group of left-wing followers (just as many other niche social media accounts do right now). The fact that it just happened to be a right-leaning group should be irrelevant.

One of the biggest problems with this suspension though is the nature of the content in which the Twitter account was suspended for. If you're claiming it's because of "hateful conduct" when the account user is doing nothing except reposting videos in their unedited, raw format, then you must personally believe there's something wrong with the conduct being recorded itself, not the user reposting it. If not, then the Twitter overlords would not be suspending accounts for that reason. In retrospect, it would've probably looked less bad for them if they had just pretended the reason why they suspended the account was merely for copyright infringement of the original users' accounts and reuploading them without permission (I don't want to give them any ideas here).

The bottom line is: If Twitter is going to go around undermining free speech culture in the United States, it should at least do it in a way that makes sense, and not in a way where it leaves a big hole in their ridiculous arguments that we can laugh at them through.