Twitter Locks Dave Rubin's Account in 'Error'

Twitter locked the account of conservative commentator and author Dave Rubin, in what the company said was an “error” — the latest such “error” to affect the account of a prominent conservative.

Rubin tweeted “They want a federal vaccine mandate for vaccines which are clearly not working as promised just weeks ago. People are getting and transmitting Covid despite vax. Plus now they are prepping us for booster shots. A sane society would take a pause. We do not live in a sane society.”

In response, Twitter locked Rubin out of his account for 12 hours, telling him that his tweet violated Twitter’s policies on “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.”

Twitter then followed up with a message telling Rubin the action was taken in error, and apologized for “any inconvenience this may have caused.”

“Yesterday’s misleading and potentially harmful information is misinformation is today’s error,” said Rubin.

Lawyer Ron Coleman, a partner at the Dhillon Law Group, which has worked on numerous high-profile cases against the tech giants, pointed out that Twitter’s “errors” affect the followers of a user as well as the user itself.

“Here’s the thing. When Twitter ‘temporarily limits’ [Dave Rubin’s] ‘account features,’ it also temporarily limits the ‘account features’ of 970,000 other ‘users,” said Coleman. “That’s *not* how a business is run in a competitive market. It’s how a #monopoly is run.”

While Twitter is protected in the U.S. by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which insulates it from a wide range of legal blowback for arbitrary content moderation, it continues to face mounting legal challenges.

The company is currently facing a lawsuit from Harmeet Dhillon’s Liberty Center on behalf of banned pro-Trump activist Rogan O’Handley (also known as “DC Draino”), which alleges Twitter colluded with the federal government to suppress his political speech. 

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.