During my brief tenure at the festering online sinkhole that is Twitter, I quickly learned the one, unbreakable rule: the left are untouchable.
I was permanently banned from the platform after just a few months, for suggesting that a troll do something that he would surely have found quite pleasurable.
On the other hand, I was relentlessly threatened with violence, and several times, explicitly with doxxing.
Doxxing, for the uninitiated, is defined by internet security company Avast as: “the practice of uncovering someone’s sensitive personal information and publishing it online. Hackers use doxxing to harass, threaten, or get revenge on someone online.”
In the otherwise Wild West of the internet, doxxing is nearly universally regarded as one of the most indelible lines in the sand. So much so that Twitter’s TOS explicitly forbid it:
You may not publish or post other people’s private information without their express authorization and permission. We also prohibit threatening to expose private information or incentivizing others to do so.
That “private information” most definitely includes, “contact information, including non-public personal phone numbers”.
On August 31st, Crikey News posted a tweet recommending that people mass-spam Craig Kelly’s mobile phone number – which they subsequently provided in the article. This broke Twitter’s community safety policy by deliberately using Twitter to orchestrate online harassment against another person.
There is no room for misunderstanding. This was an undisputed doxxing for the purpose of targeted harassment against an individual.
The Australian left hate Craig Kelly, because he dares dispute their orthodoxies on everything from free speech to climate change and the unprecedented medical miracles that are Covid vaccines. Kelly may be wrong or right – but the one thing no one is allowed to be these days is out of lockstep with the left.
Bernard Keane, the only person who somehow manages to be even more pompously tiresome than Marxist windbag Philip Adams, continued the doxxing by publishing Kelly’s phone number three times in a single tweet. Like all bullies, though, he is the first to run crying to nanny when he gets so much as a gentle tweak on his own nose.
The author of the Crikey article, Bernard Keane, has since complained that he has been ‘abused’ by people replying to his article.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s TOS states, in black and white, that: “The first time you violate this policy, we will require you to remove this content. We will also temporarily lock you out of your account before you can Tweet again. If you violate this policy again after your first warning, your account will be permanently suspended”.
The Guardian Australia’s Ben Eltham went one step further and reblogged the Crikey article with Craig Kelly’s phone number, along with an invitation to his 52k followers to send Kelly a text. Many of them obliged, dutifully sending obscene messages. While Eltham didn’t ask them to be abusive, he must have guessed it would be a predictable outcome of his actions. Once he became aware of the nature of the messages being sent, he doubled down on his invitation rather than stopping.
These tweets from Crikey, Keane, and Eltham all remain up.
But if Twitter are raging hypocrites, they show the Wisdom of Solomon in comparison to Australia’s leftists.
Ex-Liberal candidate, Indigenous Advocate, Sky News contributor, and author Warren Mundine vented his frustration at Eltham’s appalling behaviour by calling Eltham something nasty in a tweet.
Mundine apologised and Eltham declared that he wasn’t offended. Still, the Labor party and a swathe of leftist journalists campaigned vociferously to have Mundine sacked from the board of SBS.
This is the future of politics in Australia if we allow the government to encourage social media companies like Twitter to use their community guidelines as a tool of political censorship rather than a genuine level playing field for its users.
Maybe we should thank Eltham. He has shown us the inequality of the social order we live under – an environment where the left are free to intimidate the right into silence.
The Good Sauce
The problem is easily solved, though: don’t use Twitter. Twitter only retain their inordinate power because enough people continue to subscribe to their substandard sewer of leftist bilge.
Walk away, folks. Walk away.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD