Pro-life website LifeSite News was locked out of its Twitter account yesterday after it referred to radical transgender activist Jessica Yaniv by his male birth name, “Jonathan.” According to Twitter, using Yaniv’s birth name is “hateful conduct.”
LifeSite news published a screenshot of Twitter’s message demanding that the tweet be deleted before the restoration of their account. A Twitter spokeswoman confirmed to Breitbart News that LifeSite’s account has been locked under Twitter’s “hateful conduct” policy. LifeSite News disputes that their tweet was “hateful.”
Via LifeSite News:
Twitter gave LifeSiteNews the option to delete the tweet and reactivate our account immediately. But instead we have launched an appeal of the decision.
Twitter claimed that the tweet violated its rules, but didn’t specify which ones. Twitter cites three main categories in its rules: safety, privacy, and authenticity. The tweet about Yaniv was public knowledge, as it cited a tweet Yaniv posted himself. It was authentic, it was not “platform manipulation,” impersonation, a copyright infringement.
The tweet did not “promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people,” which Twitter says it prohibits.
As Rebel Media founder Ezra Levant noted after one his own reporter was locked out of his Twitter account, Yaniv is still referred to as “Jonathan” in court cases (Yaniv is currently facing trial for illegal possession of a weapon).
“Yaniv’s legal name is still Jonathan; his own mother calls him ‘him,’” said Levant. “The court case uses the name ‘Jessica Jonathan Yaniv.’”
Yaniv has become famous due to his notorious lawsuits against Canadian beauticians, whom he accused of discrimination after they refused to wax his genitals.
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Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.