President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign as well as the House and Senate GOP campaign arms, and the Republican National Committee (RNC) all announced the suspension of ad spending on the social media site, citing anti-conservative bias, reports Market Watch.
The Hill suggests the move is just an escalation in the conservative’s battle with the country’s largest tech companies, which have claimed they are routinely censored for their views. Critics claim there is little evidence for the claims other than a few isolated stories.
“Twitter’s hostile actions toward Leader McConnell’s campaign are outrageous and we will not tolerate it,” Jesse Hunt, a spokesman with the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), said in a statement to The Hill. “The NRSC will suspend all spending with Twitter until further notice. We will not spend our resources on a platform that silences conservatives.”
The executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), Parker Hamilton Poling, tweeted that the NRCC would also halt Twitter spending “until they correct their inexcusable targeting of @Team_Mitch.”
McConnell, who is running for reelection in Kentucky, is at home recovering from a fractured shoulder. The two mass-shootings over the weekend have resulted in an increased demand for stiffer gun control laws and tougher universal background checks. Demonstrators descended on McConnell’s home, blaming him for holding up gun control legislation in the Senate.
Twitter locked McConnell’s re-election campaign account after it posted videos of what it described as “violent threats” against him by protesters outside his Kentucky home. The video posted by McConnell’s campaign featured a leader from Black Lives Matter using profanities and saying she hoped McConnell had “broken his little, raggedy, wrinkled-ass neck.”
The company said in a statement that the lock-out occurred because of “a Tweet that violated our violent threats policy, specifically threats involving physical safety.” The site bans the sharing of threats of violence, even against oneself, as well as “glorification of violence.”
Trump, who apparently has a lot of leeway in what he is allowed to post on his Twitter account, has invited social media companies to the White House on Friday to discuss violent extremism online. Last month, Trump said the U.S. government should sue Facebook and Google for unspecified wrongdoing, according to Business Insider.