Worried about the rise of socialism? The Big Tech oligarchs over at Twitter don’t appear to be.
Despite a Twitter rule which states that the platform will censor accounts for using “hateful symbol[s],” a Twitter spokesperson defended the use of the communist hammer and sickle -- a symbol that Hillsdale College professor Dr. Charles N. Steele said is associated with the deaths of millions -- on the platform.
“Hateful imagery” is defined by Twitter as “any logo, symbol, or image that has the intention to promote hostility against people on the basis of race, religious affiliation, disability, sexual orientation, gender/gender identity or ethnicity/national origin.” The rules warn that “If an account uses a hateful symbol in its profile information, the account-holder will be required to remove the symbol before they can use their account again.” Hateful imagery includes, but is not limited to: “images altered to include hateful symbols or references to a mass murder that targeted a protected category.”
Currently, several accounts purporting to be political parties or political organizations from the USA, India, Britain, and Mexico are allowed to feature the hammer and sickle in profile photos.
When asked about the hammer and sickle symbol specifically, a Twitter spokesperson claimed that other countries may have culturally different assumptions of what the hammer and sickle means.
“[T]he long and short of it is that our rules are tailored to a global approach[,] and context matters,” said a Twitter spokesperson. “While, their [sic] maybe [sic] a very sorted [sic] history ascribed to a sign by a particular region or group[,] in other communities or regions it can have a completely different meaning or expanded context.”
NewsBusters TechWatch contacted Dr. Steele and asked him what the hammer and sickle symbolized historically, and he explained that the hammer and sickle is “purely a Marxist logo” and has only one meaning: “it’s a symbol of communism.”
Indeed, the hammer and sickle “is a symbol of oppression and political murder,” commented Steele. “Communists have regularly targeted groups of people on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, race, class, and sexual preference.”
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Communism has racked up an unparallelled bodycount. Steele explained how “No other economic/political philosophy has led to as much death and destruction as Marxism. Exact numbers can never be known, but a reasonable estimate is 100 million deaths (Courtois et. al, 1997, ‘The Black Book of Communism’).”
One personal anecdote he gave showed the horrors of communist tyranny on a human level:
“One of my recent students is a young woman whose family comes from Latvia. She was telling me one day how her grandfather and uncle had opposed Soviet rule before the family escaped to the West. I suggested it might be interesting to have them speak to a student group. She responded[,] ‘This is not possible. The Soviets killed them.’ The hammer and sickle is to her and her family what the swastika is to a Holocaust survivor.”
If the Twitter spokesperson’s claim is true that the communist imagery of a hammer and sickle “can have a completely different meaning or expanded context” in other “communities or regions,” why then does Twitter allow the communist party of Russia to feature the hammer and sickle?
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