Rose McGowan Suspended By Twitter: ‘There Are Powerful Forces At Work’
Rose McGowan announced on Instagram last night that Twitter had suspended her account for unspecified violations of its terms of service/rules.
“Twitter has suspended me. There are powerful forces at work. Be my voice. #RoseArmy,” the actress and Harvey Weinstein nemesis wrote on Instagram, along with a screenshot of the temporary suspension notification.
The suspension locks Rose McGowan out of her account for 12 hours, although existing tweets appear to be still visible. McGowan’s supporters on the social media platform, celebrities and non-celebrities alike, have demanded that her account be reinstated along with requesting an explanation for the action. McGowan is perhaps best known for her role as Paige Matthews on The WB television series Charmed.
[See Update below]
Rose McGowan has been very active on Twitter calling out various Hollywood luminaries in no uncertain terms for hypocrisy in the ongoing Harvey Weinstein scandal. McGowan has about 750,000 Twitter followers.
The scandal emerged last Thursday with a New York Times bombshell report about the Oscar-winning producer’s alleged pattern of sexual harassment of starlets, staffers, and other women over a 30-year period. According to the Times, Rose McGowan was subject to Weinstein’s alleged inappropriate behavior and entered into a $100,000 settlement to resolve the matter in 1997.
The Times report and a follow-up story in The New Yorker magazine opened the floodgates for Weinstein’s alleged victims to come forward. Weinstein’s alleged misconduct was apparently an open secret in Hollywood, but many kept quiet for career reasons. Seemingly minute by minute, new revelations emerge. Weinstein has been fired by The Weinstein Company, the firm he co-founded with his brother Bob in 2005, which perhaps created a safe space for the victims to go public about what they experienced on what traditionally and generically has been described as the casting couch.
“It wasn’t immediately clear which tweets violated Twitter’s rules. The actress had previously posted a message telling Ben Affleck to ‘F*** off’ and accused him of lying about his knowledge of Weinstein’s history,” Deadline Hollywood explained.
As alluded to above, McGowan, 44, who has criticized many in the Hollywood community — including Bob Weinstein — for allegedly pretending they didn’t know what was going on, has also launched a petition calling for The Weinstein Company’s board of directors to be dissolved.
Rose McGowan suspended from Twitter after speaking out against Weinstein https://t.co/36TzC9njST pic.twitter.com/3DQFctvBhR
— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) October 12, 2017
Twitter told BuzzFeed that for privacy and security reasons, it doesn’t respond to comments on the status of individual accounts. Twitter has faced criticism in the past for inconsistent application of rules leading to account suspensions, however.
Separately, there are implications that NBC News may have covered up the Weinstein scandal possibly because of its business relationship with the mogul or for other reasons.
As the Rose McGowan Twitter suspension is a developing story that is trending on social media, watch this space for updates.
Update: In a statement this morning, Twitter claimed Rose McGowan’s account was temporarily locked because a tweet contained a private phone number in violation of the platform’s terms of service. With the tweet in question now deleted, her account is now back in business. Twitter added that it supports voices that speak truth to power, but Twitter’s explanation has not charmed, as it were, either the left or the right of the ideological spectrum, as reflected in a compilation from Gateway Pundit.
[Featured Image by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP Images]
