Twitter Is Quietly Re-Suspending the Lunatics Elon Musk Let Back On

And rightly so!

Ban Hammer

It's only been a few months since Elon Musk took over Twitter and promised to resurrect those permabanned right-wing chuds who kept getting kicked off for being terrible — but now, the chickens seem to be coming home to roost.

At least two previously-suspended right-wingers — Ali Alexander, best known as Kanye West's 2024 campaign advisor, and Nick Fuentes, an incel-of-all-trades who has his very own Anti-Defamation League explainer — have been suspended this week.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hannah Gais pointed out, Fuentes got the kibosh "roughly 24 hours" after Twitter infamously allowed him back on, and Media Matters' Alex Kaplan noted that his fellow "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander was on the chopping block soon after.

Fuentes joked about his termination on Telegram, a messaging platform favored by drug dealers, Russian government officials, and white supremacists alike due to its apparent lack of rules.

"Well it was fun while it lasted," the 24-year-old wrote, according to screenshots shared on Twitter.

Censorious Musk

While it's obviously easy to laugh at the expense of such reprehensible jerks, it's worth noting that this appears to be one of the first major instances of Twitter's content moderators sticking to their guns since Musk took over the site in late October and subsequently played host to a huge uptick in hate speech.

The suspensions also come on the heels of a shorter-reaching but arguably more important Twitter censorship story out of The Intercept that claims the social network worked on behalf of India's far-right ruling party to suppress the reach of a BBC documentary that was critical of the country's controversial prime minister, Narendra Modi.

While those serious claims of legitimate censorship barely made waves in the US, they did catch the attention of Musk, who said he was simply too busy to address the issue.

"First I’ve heard," Musk wrote. "It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things."

It's unlikely that Musk hasn't heard about Alexander and Fuentes getting the can — though for now at least, he's wisely remaining silent.

More on the bird app: Desperate Twitter Auctioning Off Its Used Office Supplies