Twitter Permanently Bans Former Ku Klux Klan Leader David Duke Following ‘Repeated Violations’

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has officially lost his Twitter privileges. On Friday, the company announced that the white supremacist has been banned from the social media platform.

The decision to permanently suspend Duke’s Twitter account was based on its updated policy to block harmful content from being shared on the platform.

AP News reported that Duke, who was the leader of the KKK from 1974 to 1978, “has been permanently suspended for repeated violations of the Twitter rules on hateful conduct.”

Under its hateful conduct rule, Twitter will take action against “content that promotes violence against, threatens or harasses other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

Twitter has not specified what Duke posted that resulted in him getting permanently suspended” from the platform.

However, this isn’t the first time Twitter has taken action against Duke. In 2017, Duke’s website claimed his account was temporarily suspended after he shared a tweet that encouraged President Trump to prosecute the Obama Administration for the “serious crimes they committed.”

Most recently, Duke was banned from YouTube in June 2020 due to his repeated violations against the company’s policy on hate speech.

“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies,” a rep for YouTube said in a statement at the time.

“After updating our guidelines to better address supremacist content, we saw a 5x spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies.”