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Nazi Propaganda Tolerated On Twitter While Islamic Accounts Suspended

By Scott Falkner
Published on: 11:47 PST, Sep 4, 2016

When it comes to Twitter, you are far less likely to receive any consequences for a controversial tweet if you’re a Nazi than if you are a Muslim, or so claims a new study. The report on Nazis (Nazi sympathizers or Neo-Nazis) says that Nazis use Twitter with “relative impunity.”

The Nazi Twitter study was conducted by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, and it found that Nazi Twitter accounts usually have far more followers than militant Islamist accounts. As part of the study, 18 different prominent Nazi Twitter accounts were researched. The authors of the report noted that there has been a recently sharp increase in the number of these prominent Nazi Twitter accounts, up to 25,000from about 3,500 just four years ago. That may not seem like a huge number, but the study pointed out that the research only focused on an extremely small amount of Nazi accounts, and nowhere near the total number of accounts operated by all of the White Nationalists and Nazi sympathizers on Twitter.

[Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images]
One of the study authors, J.M. Berger, summed it up this way.

“White nationalists and Nazis outperformed ISIS in average friend and follower counts by a substantial margin. Nazis had a median follower count almost eight times greater than ISIS supporters, and a mean count more than 22 times greater.”

Twitter has had extensive focus on suspected ISIS – or Islamic State – members as of late. In August alone, Twitter said that it had shut down over 36,000 accounts that they believed were associated with ISIS. However, on the flip side, the Nazi accounts seem to be out of bounds when it comes to the Twitter patrol. However, what is the Twitter patrol? How does Twitter monitor tweets that promote terrorism, threaten abuse or hateful conduct? Largely, Twitter leaves it up to its own users to point out tweets or other users that go against Twitter’s terms of service.

So, if that’s true, what does it say about the overall Twitterverse’s reaction to Nazi posts versus ISIS posts?

The report from George Washington University points out that three of the top 10 hashtags used by both Nazi and White Nationalist sites are #Trump2016, #Trump, and #MakeAmericaGreatAgain – the slogan trumpeted by Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign.

The study from George Washington University also points out that the possible reason why Nazi and White Supremacist Twitter accounts aren’t policed as much as ISIS accounts is because, on the whole, modern Nazis really aren’t that organized. The groups exist, propagandizing their hate, but they aren’t as much of a militant threat in the 21st Century as ISIS has turned out to be. During the course of the Nazi ISIS Twitter study, over 1,100 ISIS accounts were suspended or shut down compared to seven Nazi or White Supremacist Twitter accounts.

[Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images]
Neo-Nazism is post-World War II social and political movements that echo the far right wing ideology of Nazism as defined by the Third Reich. Neo-Nazi groups exist worldwide today, and their existence is so feared that their organizations and symbols have been banned in numerous European and Latin American countries. Nazism, or National Socialism, was devised in Germany following the end of the First World War. Nazism is essentially a form of fascism that incorporates so-called “scientific” racism and antisemitism.

[Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images]

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