Kelly Neidert, a former student and political activist at the University of North Texas, had her Twitter account suspended earlier this month.
Reportedly, Neidert received a notice stating, “Your account is locked. After careful review, we determined your account broke the Twitter Rules. Your account is temporarily in read-only mode, which means you can’t tweet, retweet, or like content. Most accounts regain full access in a week, but it could take longer.”
It is not clear which tweet resulted in the suspension. The Twitter rules state, in part, that “Violence, harassment, and other similar types of behavior discourage people from expressing themselves, and ultimately diminish the value of global public conversation.”
The suspension followed in the wake of the alleged vandalism of Neidert’s apartment door last month. She posted a picture on Twitter of the damage, which she credited to “Antifa activists.”
Neidert says she has been the target of threats since helping revive a local chapter of Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) in 2019. Most have been made online, but some have not, she says, such as the incident in April when her front door was spray-painted with an obscene message.
The young activist, who graduated from the university on May 14, says she dealt with malicious harassment while on campus, which she attributes to her participation and role as the executive director of Protect Texas Kids.
The description of the organization is “a conservative grassroots group committed to exposing leftist propaganda in K-12 schools and clinics that do gender-affirming care” for children under 18.
During her UNT tenure, Neidert advocated for conservative values, often organizing rallies and protests.
In one of her last tweets before the Twitter suspension on May 8, Neidert posted a person holding a sign which read “LGBTQ liberation through socialist revolution.” Her caption that accompanied the post read: “Caption this picture.”
Another post on May 7 featured a picture of graffiti in support of the transgender community that originally read, “You can’t erase us.” In the image, the letter “t” in “can’t” had been spray-painted over in black. Neidert’s caption read: “That was easy.”
On May 15, after returning from her Twitter suspension, Neidert posted a picture of her graduation security detail.
https://twitter.com/kelly_neidert/status/1525739659191537665?s=20&t=QJq2vmhd-v6eF7WA1u7K9A
She further added a reply thanking Michelle Malkin, who originally posted on May 10 about Neidert’s ban from Twitter, for helping set up security for her graduation night.
Malkin also tweeted on May 10 about the suspension of the Protect Texas Kids Twitter account, which coincided with Neidert’s. The organization’s account was shut down after tweeting, “78% of trans people have another mental illness.”
According to Twitter, the tweet violated the platform’s rules against hateful conduct.
Malkin tweeted a screenshot of the Protect Texas Kids tweet, adding the caption, “@Twitter has now locked down Kelly Neidert’s @protect_tx_kids account for stating a FACT reported in a PEER-REVIEWED MEDICAL JOURNAL that 78% of gender-confused college students are mentally ill. ‘Hateful conduct.'”
The statistic that Protect Texas Kids’ account initially cited came from research suggesting “college students with nontraditional gender identities reported two to four times as many symptoms of mental health conditions as cisgender students.”
“The stigmatization of gender minorities produces stressors that can trigger psychological responses, leading to mental health vulnerabilities,” a co-author of the study, Sara Abelson, MPH, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told MedPage Today. “This can include stigmatization at the structural level, such as discriminatory policies, or the interpersonal level, such as harassment or family rejection.”
