Twitter Suspends Rose McGowan While Literal Nazis Keep Tweeting

Last night, Twitter remembered that it can prevent people from accessing their accounts, temporarily suspending Rose McGowan from the social media platform.

The actress and director, whose directorial debut Dawn was nominated for the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2014, is one of many famous women to have come forward as a victim of Harvey Weinstein’s harassment and Hollywood’s systematic enabling of said behavior. She has been unapologetically vocal about the story since it broke, until Twitter effectively silenced her, Variety reports, by suspending her account for 12 hours.

“Twitter has suspended me,” she posted on Instagram. “There are powerful forces at work. Be my voice.”

Variety speculated that perhaps McGowan’s suspension was connected to her tweets asking her followers to sign a petition to dissolve the entire board of the Weinstein Company or her other tweets telling Ben Affleck to “fuck off” after trying to distance himself from Weinstein’s alleged behavior. (Video from an old TRL interview in which Affleck gropes VJ Hilarie Burton circulated not long after his statement, making the whole thing look hollow and performative.) Twitter might have viewed McGowan’s tweets as harassment? Somehow? Despite all of the actual racist, misogynist harassment going down all over Twitter as we speak?

Twitter reps have since explained in a follow-up Variety articlehttp://variety.com/2017/digita… that they temporarily suspended @rosemcgowan, which has since been restored, because she used the account to post a private phone number, which is against their terms of service.

However, a quick couple of Google searches reveal that these work and cell numbers, which belong to manager Evan Hainey of Untitled Entertainment, are public-facing phone numbers that have been distributed in press releases and other similar promotional materials for years.

“Twitter is proud to empower and support the voices on our platform,” they added, “especially those that speak truth to power. We stand with the brave women and men who use Twitter to share their stories, and will work hard every day to improve our processes to protect those voices.”

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