During his appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey confessed that the social media giant unfairly banned conservatives amid the “learn to code” brouhaha.

Specifically, they were too aggressive.

“Learn to code” was a January taunt pitched at downsized left-wing journalists, encouraging them to pursue software development as a new career path. Reportedly, the phrase was rooted in media elites’ suggestion to laid-off coal miners.

Newsbusters provides a surprisingly good explanation:

Victims in part of Obama-era environmental regulations…mining jobs are routinely dismissed as long gone by journalists, and the out-of-work miners are often pointed toward the technology sector by the Brooklyn-based go-getters who write for outlets like the [New York Times]. In other words, the coal miners are told to “learn to code” by journalists who aren’t overly concerned about regulation’s effect on jobs in coal country.

When writers at Buzzfeed and elsewhere were let go, the phrase rallied on social media. As some told fired reporters to “learn to code,” Twitter banned the trolling users.

Journalists: spread false reports for days accusing a kid of racism. The kid gets death threats as a result. Also Journalists: Hey don’t tell us to “learn to code,” that’s targeted harrassment. — James Hasson (@JamesHasson20) January 28, 2019

The seriousness of the situation was bolstered by the fact that the scorned writers were receiving threats:

How the hell is this still happening @delbius, @jack? How many times are we supposed to take your word for it that you’re actually working to fix this? It’s been a decade. — Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) January 26, 2019

.@oneunderscore__ says Twitter has done "absolutely nothing" about the 4Channers targeting laid-off journalists, despite telling him they would pic.twitter.com/h7ZRhhr1eH — AM2DM by BuzzFeed News (@AM2DM) January 28, 2019

But Twitter overreacted, said CEO Dorsey.

Jack knows a bit about overreacting, as I pointed out in December–

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey…had a dustup, which went something like this: [Jack] said, “I went to Chick-fil-A! It’s awesome!” Then left-wing activists cried into the ether, because that very day was a gay holiday. Jack responded with, “I shouldn’t have gone to Chick-fil-A! It was terrible!”

To me, “I was just eating a chicken sandwich” would’ve sufficed.

On Joe Rogan’s show, journalist and fellow guest Tim Pool went into depth about the code-learning debacle, in which people who were innocently(?) making fun of sacked writers had their accounts suspended:

“With this story particularly, you have a left-wing activist who works for NBC News. … [He] writes a story saying 4Chan is organizing these harassment campaigns and death threats. And, while (online bulletin board) 4Chan was doing threads about it, you can’t accuse 4Chan simply for talking about it, because Reddit was talking about it, too, as was Twitter. So then the next day, after he publishes his article, now he’s getting threats, and then Twitter issues a statement saying, ‘We will take action.’ And to make matters worse, when John Levine, a writer for The Wrap got a statement from one of your spokespeople saying, ‘Yes, we are banning people for saying, “Learn to code,”‘ a bunch of journalists came out and then lied…saying, ‘This is not true. This is fake news.’ Then a second statement was published by Twitter saying, ‘This is part of our harassment campaign.’ And so the mainstream narrative becomes, ‘Oh, they’re only banning people who are part of our harassment campaign.’ But you literally see legitimate, high profile individuals getting suspensions for joining in on a joke.”

Twitter’s Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead, Vijaya Gadde, affirmed the hasty moves:

“Oh, there for sure probably are mistakes in there. I don’t think any of us are claiming we got this 100% right.”

Now from the horse’s — that would be, Jack’s — mouth:

“And probably our team having a lack of context into actually what’s happening, as well. And we would fully admit we probably were way too aggressive when we first saw this, as well, and made mistakes.”

For more on the Learn to Code buncha goofiness, see streiff’s article, “No, Out-Of-Work Lefty Journalists, “Learn To Code” Is Not A Secret Alt-Right Phrase.”

Watch the video below, and enjoy some great points by Tim Pool.

-Alex

My relevant RedState links in this article: here.

See 3 more pieces from me: Lindsey on Fire, murdering white people, and Trump’s Arlington surprise.

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