Twitter suspended reporters’ accounts who tweeted White House senior adviser Stephen Miller’s private phone number on Wednesday, but hasn’t done the same to a professor who tweeted a list of over 1,500 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees’ personal information.
Miller’s private phone number spread throughout Twitter after Splinter published it in an article titled, “Here’s Stephen Miller’s Cell Phone Number, If You Need It,” with no byline.
Under Twitter’s policies, spreading “non-public, personal phone numbers” is prohibited. Twitter temporarily suspended accounts that spread the article, including a number of reporters and Splinter’s own account, The Daily Beast reported. Splinter’s Twitter account appears to have been restored to normal at the time of publication.
“It’s against our policies to share other people’s private information on Twitter, including directly linking to that information,” a Twitter spokesperson in a statement. “We temporarily blocked accounts that shared this information until they deleted the Tweet that violated our rules.”
Not all accounts that tweeted the Splinter article were suspended, however. Nebraska Antifa, a twitter account affiliated with the domestic terrorist organization, also tweeted out the article and said, “Take notice: this is how you write a headline.”
Nebraska Antifa also happens to be the account that helped spread the dox — publicizing personal information such where an individual lives, where he works, or his contact information — of 1,595 ICE employees’ that a New York University (NYU) adjunct professor compiled using LinkedIn profiles. (RELATED: The Person Doxxing ICE Employees Is A Professor At NYU)
“Some enterprising hero archived the ICE employees listed on linkedin,” Antifa Nebraska tweeted on Tuesday, which included a link to the database of over 1,500 ICE employees’ personal information. Antifa Nebraska’s twitter accound, @antifa_ne, remains active.
The NYU professor, Sam Lavigne, has not had his account suspended at the time of publication. Lavigne tweeted on Tuesday, “I scraped LinkedIn for people that work for ICE,” with a link to a Medium blog post wherein he detailed his motivation for creating the database.
After that he tweeted again with a direct link to a GitHub page where the database could be briefly accessed before GitHub removed the post.
Twitter’s policies state that sharing private information is against its rules. However, Lavigne worked around it by posting what the ICE employees made available about themselves on their LinkedIn, such as their first and last name, their role at ICE, and the city they live or work in.
Other popular platforms’ policies, in this case Medium and GitHub, have stricter policies regarding the spread of individuals’ dox.
Lavigne wrote in the blog post on Medium that he created the database in response to President Donald Trump’s “inhumane” zero-tolerance policy regarding illegal immigration and linked his readers to the database in the post, but Medium removed the page for violating its terms of service.
GitHub, where the ICE employees’ information was posted, removed the database for violating its terms, too. “We removed the project because it violates our community guidelines,” a GitHub spokesperson said. “In general, we have policies against use of GitHub for doxxing and harassment, and violating a third party’s privacy.”
Twitter said in an email to The Daily Caller News Foundation Thursday that it will not be suspending Lavigne’s account or removing his tweets.
“At this time, the links in the Tweets you’ve referenced contain no information since they’ve been disabled by other services, and as such, we will not enforce our policy in this specific instance,” a Twitter spokeswoman said.
This post has been updated to include comment from a Twitter spokeswoman.
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