Famed TV show creator allegedly suspended from Twitter after wishing death on Trump defender
Jun 11, 2018 5:47 pm
Take a cursory peek at the Twitter feed of David Simon — creator of HBO’s “The Wire” — and you get the inkling fairly quickly that he’s just a little bit opinionated, firing right back at posts he doesn’t like, dressing down senders with screenplay-worthy insults, and blocking many of them.
Oh, and as you might expect with an entertainment figure, Simon is no fan of President Donald Trump.
A year ago Simon drew headlines for telling his Twitter followers that if Trump fires special counsel Robert Mueller — who’s leading the FBI investigation into Russia’s alleged ties to the 2016 election — they should get violent.
“If Donald Trump fires Robert Mueller and is allowed to do so, pick up a goddamn brick,” Simon tweeted last June. “That’s all that’s left to you.”
What did Simon tweet this time?
But after he tweeted last week that a user who seemed to defend Trump “should die of a slow moving venereal rash that settles in your lying throat,” Simon suggested that the latter message got him suspended from Twitter — and prevented him from tweeting a reaction to the death of his friend, Anthony Bourdain.
The Twitter user in question argued with Simon that Trump’s immigration policy is not unlike the previous administration’s and that, if elected, Clinton “would probably be bombing mothers & kids in Iran (or somewhere similar) by now… Not saying any of it’s good, just no need for rose tinted specs. All politicians are evil/devious just in different measures.” And Simon didn’t like that very much.
Twitter wouldn’t confirm Simon’s suspension or the reason for it, EW reported.
What else did Simon say?
Then at the ATX Television Festival Saturday, Simon said he’d “get back on” Twitter and “basically say all of the same things” to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Variety reported.
“I’m going to use the exact same language,” Simon added at the event, according to the outlet. “I’m just going to say, ‘Really, for your polices, you should drop dead.'” In fact, on his website post about this issue, Simon penned a one-liner that read, “Die of boils, @jack.”
Simon also said social media contributes to lack of accountability for how information gets transmitted, Variety reported.
“There are always people who traffic in false premises,” Simon declared, the outlet said, “but you couldn’t slander people in the pre-digital era because, in the act of publishing, you made yourself vulnerable. The power of social media has transformed rhetoric. No one is held responsible in the same way when print and broadcast had to be held legally responsible for what they said. The tonality has completely bypassed the structure by which we establish political truth.”
Simon added, “I feel like this is the moment where you’ve got to stand up. Certain things that we took for granted, that were inherently implausible and beyond the pale for our political construct, are now on the table. If you’re trying to occupy public space with narrative, whether it’s television or film or art or journalism [and] you’re not speaking to this, you’re missing a moment that you’re obligated to,” Variety said.
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