The Twitter purge after the Capitol riots left 75% of Senate Republicans with fewer followers, with several losing tens of thousands, shows an analysis by The Post.
Many of the Senate’s most powerful Democrats, meanwhile, have gained tens of thousands of followers since January 6, reveal data from the Social Blade tracking website.
On the Democratic side, many of the big winners were the stars of the 2020 presidential primaries: Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar had more than 70,000 followers in the month; Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts rose more than 80,000; Bernie Sanders took over 350,000, while vice president-elect Kamala Harris led with a gain of 1.3 million.
Recently, Twitter also quarreled with President-elect Joe Biden for his refusal to transfer the more than 33 million followers from the official @POTUS account to Biden when he takes office. The company transferred 13 million @POTUS followers from Obama to Trump in 2017. Biden was forced to start from scratch with @PresElectBiden, which will revert to the new @POTUS account on January 20. The account has about 850,000 followers.
A review of all 100 Senate accounts showed that only two Democrats, Dianne Feinstein of California and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, lost followers in the past 30 days.
Among Republicans, some of the biggest losers were majority leader Mitch McConnell, who lost 45,000; Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, dropped more than 50,000; Marco Rubio of Florida, who lost 78,000; and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who led the losers with a decline of more than 112,000 followers.
Although an unknown number of right-wing accounts probably escaped after President Trump’s permanent suspension from the platform, Twitter confirmed that it was taking aggressive steps to remove unwanted accounts.
On Monday, the company revealed that it froze over 70,000 accounts for sharing content associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. Many devotees of the idea played an active role in the Capitol’s deadly revolt.
Twitter advocates among Democrats and Republicans have long insisted that, as a private company, it has the right to decide who can and cannot have accounts on the platform, but others disagree.
“We are living in a really dangerous period now, when freedom of expression is under orchestrated attack across the board,” NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller told The Post. “Since January 6, it has affected mainly the right-wing people.”
Miller, who is currently suing his colleagues after saying that they defamed him for raising questions about wearing masks, said QAnon was largely a “pretext for censorship”.
“What we are witnessing is the transformation of the Western Internet by companies and the state into a forum much more like the Internet in China,” said Miller. “In China, it is taken for granted when you are online, under surveillance and can be punished for dissenting expression.
Twitter declined to comment.