Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin engaged in a Twitter feud with “female rapper” Azealia Banks this week. Banks made a vile suggestion for the politician to be “gang-raped.” Twitter didn’t want to referee the feud and allowed Banks to exercise her right to free speech regarding the sexually violent language. They wrote: “We reviewed the content and determined that it was not in violation of the Twitter Rules.”
This statement was in response to a user who complained to the social media giant. The complaint was made public on Breitbart News. It reads:
“The high profile twitter user @AZEALIABANKS openly continues to advocate for rape, violent, brutal sexual & physical violence in ‘offensive, vulgar, abusive and obscene’ terms towards a targeted woman and her family in clear violation of Twitter’s strong stand against this sort of behavior,” the complaint reads. “This user continues to make ‘threats of violence’ and continues to ‘promote violence’ against a targeted [sic] individual and her family. This harassment by the user’s own public admission, was ‘unprovoked’ and is ‘is one-sided’ and ‘includes threats’ – direct, explicit and graphic. @AZEALIABANKS is ‘promoting violence’ advocating ‘direct attacks’ and ‘threats’ on the basis of ‘race’, ‘gender’ and ‘religious affiliation’. I am encouraged that you ‘do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories’ as for the past 72 hours this has been 90% of the of tweets coming from this @AZEALIABANKS. This user has openly tweeted the fact she selected to target this individual based on her opposition to the target’s beliefs. I am encouraged that your policy includes: ‘In order to ensure that people feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs, we do not tolerate behavior that crosses the line into abuse, including behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another user’s voice.’ The resulting media coverage has created over 500,000 google results in a three day period already with seemingly no action from Twitter to what is a very high profile violation of your own stated Terms of Service. I look forward to your swift response, your swifter action and reaffirming for members of your community (of which I am one) that threats of sexual & racial violence against women will not stand on your platform.”
Banks was wrong to suggest anyone be abused and [sic] such a manner – it’s so disgusting.
Palin, on the other hand, needs to stop engaging on social media as well. She suggested on Facebook the two of them band together in “condoning racism,” the error has since been editing to read “condemning racism.”
