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Two historians are among a list of scholars whose Twitter accounts were suspended

Twitter says they had been suspended in error by the company’s anti-spam technology.

It was Saturday morning, and Kevin Gannon was drinking coffee, watching some pregame college football, and posting a series of tweets about the only time a Supreme Court justice had been impeached. He said it felt timely given the Senate hearings this week and Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault against the Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Gannon, a professor of history at Grand View University, in Des Moines, went to refill his coffee. When he returned, he found his Twitter account, with more than 40,000 followers, had been suspended. He told The Chroniclehe’d received a message that his account had been frozen in connection to breaking some of the social-networking service’s rules, though it wasn’t clear what he had done wrong.

He initially thought he might have been the target of an organized social-media campaign with the goal of suspending his account. Gannon is an active personality on Twitter, and he said he had been the subject of online harassment before, though he had never been reported or suspended, he said.

It wasn’t until later in the day that Gannon realized he was part of a larger group of academics who had been suspended. It wasn’t clear why their accounts had been temporarily taken down. Those suspended included Eleanor Parker, a lecturer in medieval English literature at the University of Oxford who tweets under the handle @ClerkofOxford, and Carl Robert Keyes, an associate professor of early American history at Assumption College, who directs @SlaveAdverts250. ...

Read entire article at The Chronicle of Higher Education