Change the Terms Coalition: Ejecting David Duke from Twitter and Pressuring the Platform to Ban White Supremacists
As Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and his executive team continued to stall on a platform-wide ban of white supremacists, Balestra Media created a communications strategy for Change the Terms on proactive and rapid response planning aimed at spurring the platform to action. Our goal from March through the summer was to ensure that we offered new, virtual opportunities for top-tier media outlets to highlight the need for CTT’s model policies to disrupt white supremacy online.
In March, Balestra worked with coalition members on an open letter to Twitter on its 14th “birthday” urging the company to ban white supremacists. Balestra secured an exclusive story with Gizmodo, an outlet known for drawing high-profile attention to hateful activity online, by offering the letter, pitching interviews with multiple CTT members, drafting quotes and providing egregious examples of white supremacists operating on Twitter. The resulting piece, “Civil Rights Groups Cancel Twitter's 'Birthday,' Say CEO Is Giving Nazis a 'Megaphone,'” prominently featured our campaign as a major battle for the year and coalition members as leaders applying pressure on the company to enact needed changes. The full article—complete with screenshots we provided of hate on the platform—included the coalition’s efforts and the perspectives of eight different partners involved.
Our rapid response efforts ensured that Twitter was not able to get major media coverage for positive developments without a critique from Change the Terms on why full adoption of the coalition’s model terms is needed to combat hate and racialized disinformation. When Twitter was eliciting praise for expanding its policy to prohibit dehumanization based on age, disease and disability in their rules against hateful conduct, Change the Terms acknowledged their embrace of select CTT recommendations while highlighting how they must go further. Balestra worked to get the rapid response statement in CNET, a leading technology outlet monitored by Twitter, quoting Free Press co-CEO and CTT co-founder Jessica J. González urging Twitter to go further to prohibit hate directed against people based on their race, ethnicity and immigration status.
In late May through early June, Twitter made headlines again as they moved to label the “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” tweet by President Trump as glorifying violence—in contrast to Facebook. Though outlets were focused on President Trump’s reaction and the public conflict between the two internet platforms, Balestra deployed a rapid response statement to reinforce the importance of Twitter’s action while again connecting it to the needed next step of banning all white supremacists. Using media relationships built over the last year and aggressive personal pitching, Balestra got substantial attention for CTT in pushing Twitter farther. In CNET’s “Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and the fight for social media's soul,” Center for American Progress senior fellow and CTT co-founder Henry Fernandez is quoted "Now that Twitter is emboldened, sees the public is behind them, and has committed to doing its part to flag disinformation and threats of violence from the president, it must also take a stand against other hateful activity on its platform."
Through a series of meetings, Change the Terms and Balestra continued to surface and resurface tweets from white supremacists who continued to violate platform policy. At the end of July, Twitter announced that it was permanently removing David Duke. Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, Twitter’s Vice President of Public Policy & Philanthropy, publicly thanked Change the Terms for its work on the problem and continuing the dialogue. In a piece by Black Enterprise, two paragraphs were devoted to Change the Terms’ advocacy leading to the change and CTT co-founder Jessica J. González’s push for a full ban.
In NPR’s Market Watch, Fernandez reiterated the Change the Terms call for a white supremacist ban and for moderation policies to be equally applied to politicians on Twitter. In Variety, CTT co-founder Jessica J. González summarized “The failure to take down hate and disinformation at Twitter is a feature, not a bug. Twitter needs to be accountable to its users, not just to its main user.”
Change the Terms also understood that a combined social media and earned media strategy was needed to pressure Twitter to ban white supremacists across the platform. Since launching the @ChangeTerms Twitter account, Balestra Media emphasized a hyper-focused strategy to build a high-quality audience for CTT, attracting activists, platform leaders, and technology reporters. To date, nearly one-third of CTT’s Twitter followers are technology reporters and industry stakeholders. We illustrated the importance of our broader demands for a platform-wide ban on white supremacists with egregious examples of specific white supremacist influencers operating on Twitter. These individuals—Patrick Casey, Richard Spencer and David Duke—were lifted up as examples in CTT’s digital strategy for their roles in planning the deadly August 12, 2017 rally in Charlottesville, VA. By July 31 of this year, both Casey and Duke were removed from the platform.
Following in-depth reporting from CTT co-founding partner Heidi Beirich and Wendy Via of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, over 50 Twitter accounts associated with Casey’s “American Identity Movement” (AIM) and their European counterparts “Generation Identity” (GI) were purged from the platform. While David Duke’s ban from the platform grabbed national headlines, the dissolution of 50+ AIM and GI accounts dealt an irreparable blow to neo-fascist organizing on both sides of the Atlantic.
The removal of David Duke from Twitter was a proud moment for Change the Terms, gained through years of hard work and outreach by coalition members. When Duke’s removal was announced, Balestra quickly pivoted back to the larger goal of removing all white supremacists once and for all. Around the anniversary of Charlottesville, we continued highlighting egregious examples of white supremacists using the platform, including Richard Spencer. In a thread posted to Twitter, illustrating Spencer’s role fomenting hateful activities on and off the platform, we put Twitter leadership on notice that we would not stop fighting for a comprehensive policy. The thread was also a reminder to our followers how influential hate mongers continue to operate with impunity on the platform. This powerful thread created hundreds of thousands of impressions and generated thousands of engagements.