PDX Stormers, the Nazis Who Got Kicked Out of Lucky Lab Beer Hall, Just Got Purged From Twitter

Last year, a former Twitter employee called the site a "honeypot for assholes."

An antifascist counterprotest on Portland's waterfront on June 30, 2017. (William Gagan)

The Twitter hate-speech crackdown has hit Portland neo-Nazis.

The Twitter account PDX Stormers, which spewed hate speech and trumpeted Nazi ideologies, has been suspended in the social media site's crackdown on abusive behavior.

The suspension was first noted today by freelance journalist Mike Bivins.

The PDX Stormers group was promoted on flyers distributed by the self-proclaimed "national socialists" who were kicked out of Lucky Lab Beer Hall earlier this year.

On Monday, Twitter started shuttering accounts belonging to prominent white nationalists and people who marched in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counter-protester was killed in an allegedly premeditated attack.

Twitter says it will focus its purge of abusive accounts specifically on those that "make specific threats of violence or wish for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people."

The social media site has long been criticized for allowing intimidating, harassing or even threatening tweets to remain on its platform. Last year, a former employee called the site a "honeypot for assholes" in a BuzzFeed takedown of the company's 10-year failure to silence persistently violent accounts.

But this week's move to quash the more violent contributors to far-right Twitter may signal a change in the company's approach to filtering out hate speech from free speech.

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