Twitter Bans Nazi Royalty

One by one, the purveyors of bigotry, hate speech and white supremacy have departed from Twitter - or, more accurately, have been caused to depart. Milo Yiannopoulos was removed from the platform, as was Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who styles himself Tommy Robinson. More recently, pro-am motormouth Katie Hopkins was also removed. Now has come more good news, as actual neo-Nazis have vanished from view.

Martin Sellner - no longer on Twitter

Martin Sellner, who is the nearest the modern far-right has to actual Nazi royalty, has made a startling discovery, or rather, his wife Brittany Sellner (née Pettibone) has made it: his account has been suspended, to the great relief of all those who wished it had happened rather earlier. Sellner is already permanently banned from the UK, and also from the USA: his marriage to Ms Pettibone could therefore not happen Stateside.

Now Mrs Sellner, she told the world yesterday “[Martin Sellner] was just suspended from Twitter. No reason given of course”. Other than he’s an actual neo-Nazi, he’s banned from the UK and USA, and he’s a key player in Generation Identity, an actual neo-Nazi movement which should have been proscribed in the UK long ago.

Meanwhile, Brittany Sellner had yet worse news: her husband was not the only one to have his Twitter account suspended yesterday. “A bunch of Generation Identity affiliated accounts were suspended, so it looks like it was a targeted purge”. Victimhood playing, much? The “targeted purge” included the accounts Identitäre Bewegung (@IBDeutschland) and Thaïs (@Tha_is_dcf). But there was one small consolation.

And that was that Sellner had, you guessed it, opened a Parler account. His wife duly told the world “Martin is on Parler”. His problem there is that Parler, like Twitter, not only has rules on things like hate speech, it is also increasingly minded to apply them. So Sellner’s sojourn on the latter platform may not be a particularly long or happy one.

But he did have the comfort of knowing that someone sympathised with him. The problem is that the individual sympathising with him was the singularly repellant David Vance, whose residence in an alternate reality led him to respond “Sorry to see this. Twitter is all about free speech suppression”. And, as Jon Stewart might have said, two things here.

One, Sellner has not had his freedom of speech abridged or curtailed in any way - this is a response to repeated violation of Twitter’s Ts and Cs. And Two, if Vance had a normal relationship with reality - which he does not - he would realise that he of all people would be best advised to wind his neck in. Because he’s likely to be next out the door.

The time of Nazis on Twitter was for a time, but not for all time. Just rejoice at that news.

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