Fans of Candace Owens are up in arms because she got suspended over a tweet that advocates for people to violate the lockdown orders by Governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. Here’s the offending tweet:
🚨ALERT🚨
Candace Owens has been suspended from Twitter.
Candace tweeted that people in Michigan should go back to work.
What rule did she break?
Not even Twitter can say.Candace Owens tells people to work and gets cancelled but AOC can tell people *not* to work and all good pic.twitter.com/4tCH3ibUcW
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) May 2, 2020
Twitter explained why they suspended her over the tweet:
Twitter flagged Owens’s tweet for violating the site’s policies, according to the news source Mediaite. Owens alerted several conservative colleagues of her suspended account following her critique of Whitmer.
A spokeswoman for Twitter confirmed to The Hill that Owens’s tweet violated the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy, “specifically around heightened-risk health claims.”
She added that, according to the policy, Owens’s tweet involved “denial of … government body recommendations to decrease an individual’s likelihood of exposure to COVID-19 with the intent to influence users into acting contrary to recommended guidance.”
The spokeswoman said the tweet would need to be deleted while Owens served a “timeout” before her profile could be reinstated.
There ya go. Owens seems like a rhetorical bomb-thrower to me, so I’m not a big fan. It must be noted that Whitmer has eased up on some of the restrictions, even though she’s ignored the Republican-led legislature in order to keep her stay-at-home command in power. We’ll have to see if the protests have any effect. She has definitely gone too far with her lockdown order.
And while she’s faced a lot of opposition from the right over her orders, it really appears like she’s gotten even MORE popular with the left, since they’re now talking about her as a possible VP pick. How bizarre…