Twitter officially suspends Patrick Byrne’s account, an enthusiastic and dedicated online ally of Donald J. Trump on election 2020. He is the founder and longtime CEO of former e-tailing giant Overstock – one of the first companies to accept crypto payments, launched the tZERO security token trading platform, and acquired the company behind Ravencoin.
Byrne was banned from Twitter on Tuesday. The social media company is yet to explain why it removed Byrne but over the past few months, he has made several allegations of election fraud.
In late November, he announced that he’d fund a team of hackers and cybersleuths to validate the conspiracy theory that fueled insurrection at the Capitol riot. Courts found no credible evidence that vote totals had been changed or manipulated.
In late December, he created a story that he’d been present at an election overthrow strategy meeting of Trump advisers, where Trump and others discussed how to reverse Trump’s loss to President-elect Joe Biden.
“My involvement is I was in the room when it happened. The raised voices included my own. I can promise you: President Trump is being terribly served by his advisers. They want him to lose and are lying to him. He is surrounded by mendacious mediocrities.” – tweeted by Byrne.
Recently, on the night before the Capitol riot, he told a crowd of Trump supporters that the “rigged election” represents the rise of an authoritarian regime.
After attempts to label a warning against misinformation, Twitter finally officially banned the @PatrickByrne account for the reason “violate the Twitter Rules”.
The consequences of the ban of Patrick Byrne
In response to the social media corporate’s move, Byrne attributed its censorship to “Orwellian” and “fascism”. He shared with Gizmodo news on 2/14/2021:
“Twitter was not really part of my life. I never used it once until a year ago (all prior tweets were from a press assistant). In the last year, I used it a handful of times at best, up until I got involved in this election fraud matter a couple of months ago. I have used it extensively, and my followers jumped to 300,000.
Why did they do it? Because they are Orwellian. Fascism is a phenomenon of the Left, remember.”
The decision to remove users, posts and tweets has been criticised by some for violating free speech rights. Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat have already taken steps to censorship Mr. Trump, while Amazon shut down Parler, an app widely used by his supporters.
On Monday Jan 11th,2021 the German chancellor’s spokesperson said she found the social media ban “problematic”.
And the Mexican president said:
“I don’t like anybody being censored.”
Bruce Fenton – founder and CEO of Atlantic Financial expresses his comment about Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne has been banned from Twitter
“Censorship is wrong. This platform will fail.”
Twitter users claim that a closed platform does not stand a chance against an open and free exchange of ideas. But clearly, in the context of censor, not because he’s a bitcoin investor and for being a former CEO of Overstock, it is because of violating the Twitter Rules.
Twitter has banned the account of Patrick Byrne. Byrne is a long time Bitcoiner and investor and former CEO of Overstock who led the decision of the company to originally accept Bitcoin and invest in the space.
Censorship is wrong. This platform will fail.
— Bruce Fenton (@brucefenton) January 13, 2021
It’s not clear how Incoming US President-elect Joe Biden intends to regulate Big Tech but ideally, it will have a big move. Like he has said before, he wants companies like Facebook and Twitter to do more to take down hate speech and fake news.
