‘Wire’ Creator David Simon Rips Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey After Return From Suspension: ‘Die of Boils, @Jack’
David Simon returned from his Twitter suspension with a fury on Friday, calling out CEO Jack Dorsey for what he sees as the platform’s hypocrisy in how it deals with trolls.
“Die of boils, @jack. Yup. There it is. The sum total of my crime against Twitter,” tweeted the creator of HBO series “The Wire,” “Treme” and “The Deuce,” in a lengthy thread (which you can read below). “I’ve told you to drop dead, as I told libelers and liars to drop dead. You can say that constitutes a threat, but that would be empty and embarrassing. I hold no dominion over life & death.”
Simon wrote on his personal website two weeks ago that he was suspended from the platform for telling Twitter trolls to drop dead, or as he put it: “Slander is cool, brutality is acceptable. But the hyperbolic and comic hope that a just god might smite the slanderer or brutalizer with a deadly skin disorder is somehow beyond the pale.”
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Simon’s main issue was that he was not able to get a clear explanation as to why his tweets were deemed unacceptable but “a–holes who slander 14-year-old Holocaust survivors” are allowed to “repeat itself for months on end.”
“I’ve given you two patient weeks, @jack, to engage in any coherent, honorable and intellectually honest way with the substance of my appeal of a 01110011101-brained conceputalization of rhetoric that honors slander and falsehood but cannot somehow abide mere insult. Nothing,” he tweeted.
Simon began his expletive-filled tweet storm: “Still waiting for a cogent explanation of why the common rhetoric of telling assholes to drop dead is prohibited on your s—hole platform. But allowing said assholes to slander women who have had children kidnapped is fine by you…”
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The suspension coincided with the death of Simon’s close friend, Anthony Bourdain. Simon was especially angry that he was not able to share his feelings for the former TV host on Twitter, instead penning a lengthy tribute on his website.
“Still waiting for you to either restore those posts or provide any response to your conduct, which includes barring me from commenting on the death of friend, while some s–t-troll remains on Twitter unmolested, declaring – unevidenced – that the death was a political murder,” Simon wrote.
You can read Simon’s full (profanity-laced) thread full below:
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