Permanently banning Shepard is evidence that they’re starting to go after less controversial voices.

In a video by Canadian free speech activist and Wilfred Laurier University graduate student Lindsay Shepard, the activist announced she was been permanently banned from Twitter earlier this week.



The banning was the result of a Twitter exchange with a transgender woman and LGBTQ advocate named Jessica Yaniv in which the activist mocked Shepard for suffering from a uterine condition known as septate uterus. In a tweet Shepard later deleted, she replied:

“at least I have a uterus you ugly fat man.”

As reported by The Post Millenial:

The suspension comes after a jousting match with a notorious trans woman named JY who has been accused of predatory behavior toward children and making frivolous human rights complaints. The Post Millennial reached out to Shepherd who said, “I got suspended for two tweets (although they didn’t tell me exactly which tweets were the problem so I am giving my best guess).” Shepherd, who is also a columnist for The Post Millennial, told us that she is concerned about her inability to respond to mistruths now that she is banned from the platform. “Well, I am most concerned about the lies that can now be spread that I cannot counteract via Twitter. For instance, I saw an account tweeted that I have ‘sock puppet’ accounts. No, I do not have any accounts other than @NewWorldHominin. But I can’t correct that misinformation anymore.”

Mrs. Shepard first came to international prominence in late 2017 when she released a recording of being interrogated by staff at Wilfred Laurier University following a class in which she presented a Jorden Peterson clip in contrast with a pro-Transgender video as part of a class exercise.

For this, she was threatened with having violated Canadian human rights law for having presented a video of Professor Peterson whom the staff compared to being as bad as “Hitler or Milo Yiannopolis”.

The following June, Shepard filed a $3.6million lawsuit against Wilfred Laurier which was followed up by a subsequent defamation suit by Professor Peterson.

Lindsay Shepard is by no means a controversial voice in the free speech debate. Though she was accused of spreading trans-phobic material in the classroom, she’s otherwise a left-leaning centrist who supports vegetarianism.

Twitter’s decision to permanently ban the otherwise uncontroversial Mrs. Shepard is further evidence of Twitter’s ongoing repression of conservatives and free speech activists on their social media platform.

In contrast to Lindsay’s tweets, Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King sent out a series of now-deleted violent tweets this past weekend in response to the attempted bombing of an ICE detention center in Tacoma Washington which he deleted and suffered no penalty from twitter for:

Van Spronsen just became the first martyr attempting to liberate imprisoned refugees from a for-profit detention center in Tacoma, Washington,” King tweeted. “His hero was John Brown -the white abolitionist who led the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. This is what our country has come to. This is where Van Spronsen was murdered this weekend. His actions will be called terrorism, and people will call him crazy, but neither are true. His mind was very clear. He is now ‘arm in arm with John Brown.’ These camps must be shut down.

While Twitter has banned controversial voices like Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopolis, and Gavin Mcinnes in the past, permanently banning Shepard is evidence that they’re starting to go after less controversial voices as well and that they’ll look for any excuse to ban effective advocates of ideas like free speech.



