Search for "fuck Trump" on Twitter, and you'll get thousands of results. But some people have been reporting messages from Twitter notifying them of "potentially abusive activity" after posting anti-Trump statements.
The Verge reports that after developer Victoria Fierce tweeted a forceful response to the administration's recent rollback of transgender protections in schools, which quoted a tweet by VP Mike Pence, Twitter put her on a temporary time-out. In her case, this meant that only her followers (which don't include Pence) could see her tweets for the next 12 hours.
The tweet said: "Fuck you. I gotta piss, and you’re putting me — an American — in danger of assault by your white supremacist brothers."
"It was just one tweet," Fierce told The Verge, "and certainly not the first time I've told an elected official to fuck off."
Twitter says it's been rolling out changes starting last week that are designed to combat abusive accounts. When it determines that an account is abusive, it hides its tweets from anyone who's not a follower for a set number of hours. Twitter has not expanded on what exactly it determines as abusive, which has sparked many conversations on free speech surrounding the issue.
A Twitter spokesperson told The Verge that instead of documenting single tweets, it follows "patterns of abuse." The spokesperson added that the medium's content filters are continually evolving.
"Politically, I think this sends a message that Twitter considers all forms of abuse equal," said Fierce. "To their systems, a white supremacist calling for shooting a person of color is just as bad as an angry Latinx renter telling their city's rent board to fuck off."
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