A protester stands on a car in Charlotte, N.C., on Wednesday. (Jason Miczek/Reuters)

Twitter temporarily suspended the account of a conservative blogger and law professor Wednesday following a tweet that appeared to urge motorists to run over demonstrators blocking traffic in Charlotte, N.C. The suspension occurred during the second night of protests over the fatal police shooting of a black man.

Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and USA Today columnist who created the popular Instapundit website, retweeted a link to local news report of protesters stopping traffic along I-277 along with a three-word message: “Run them down.”

The tweet sparked immediate outrage on Twitter, with several users urging both the paper and school to reprimand Reynolds.





@UTKLaw are you aware of the statement that Glenn Reynolds made? https://t.co/4N8MLYDZym — Amber Dawn (@Amber_Aquarius) September 22, 2016









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Twitter reinstated Reynolds’ account on Thursday afternoon.

Twitter has unblocked my account on condition of deleting the offending tweet. I've done so, but it's here:: https://t.co/DDkZd2el6Y — Instapundit.com (@instapundit) September 22, 2016





A spokesman for Twitter said the company would not comment on individual accounts “for privacy and security reasons,” but pointed to a rule that prohibits “abusive behavior”:

Violent threats (direct or indirect): You may not make threats of violence or promote violence, including threatening or promoting terrorism.

“Sorry, blocking the interstate is dangerous, and trapping people in their cars is a threat,” Reynolds wrote in a blog post on Thursday morning. “Driving on is self-preservation, especially when we’ve had mobs destroying property and injuring and killing people.”

Reynolds continued:

I’ve always been a supporter of free speech and peaceful protest. I fully support people protesting police actions, and I’ve been writing in support of greater accountability for police for years. But riots aren’t peaceful protest.

And blocking interstates and trapping people in their cars is not peaceful protest — it’s threatening and dangerous, especially against the background of people rioting, cops being injured, civilian-on-civilian shootings, and so on. I wouldn’t actually aim for people blocking the road, but I wouldn’t stop because I’d fear for my safety, as I think any reasonable person would.

“Run them down” perhaps didn’t capture this fully, but it’s Twitter, where character limits stand in the way of nuance.

“I don’t even know that this is why I was suspended, as I’ve heard nothing from Twitter at all,” he continued. “They tell users and investors that they don’t censor, but they seem awfully quick to suspend people on one side of the debate and … awfully tolerant of outright threats on the other.”

Reynolds added: “Twitter can do without me, as I can certainly do without Twitter.”

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