The Onion Has Been Permanently Banned From Twitter

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

In a sudden, inexplicable, and chilling act of censorship, The Onion has been permanently banned from Twitter. This is a dark day for journalism and sets a grim precedent for the freedom of expression in America.

On Apr. 21, 2022, The Onion was found guilty of the truth in a sham trial presided over by Judge Jack Dorsey and his jury of sycophant moderators. We now publish this press release on our Twitter account in a desperate effort to show these corporate tyrants that their barbarity will not go unchallenged.

The truth perishes in the night.

We call on all defenders of free speech to retweet our tweet about Twitter banning us. Feel free to quote-tweet our tweet too, but only to say something nice. Don’t let Twitter get away with this.

This is a tragic moment in the history of America’s Finest News Source. Our reporters are deeply troubled by this unfounded attack on their principles, and many of them say they no longer recognize the website they live in. We haven’t seen such a brutal challenge to the notion of a free press since a chlamydia outbreak in our newsroom back in 2012 rendered most of our staff unable to work.

In that painful, secretion-filled summer, as now, The Onion could only imagine what nefarious forces were really behind an attempt to muzzle us. We suspect that our Twitter ban is but the end of a thread that, once unraveled, would lead us deep into America’s chasm of lies. We wish we could find out who these shadowy powers are, but we can’t, obviously, because Twitter banned us. Keep up.

Sadly, this is not The Onion’s first time being silenced. We’ve long suspected that Facebook shadow-banned us in 2015 when our finances nosedived because Facebook censored the fact that they were just making up engagement numbers. We also surmise that hidden powers have colluded to gag us by placing so many ads on our website as to render it functionally unreadable. Finally, a glance at the New York Times bestseller list reveals not a single one of The Onion’s many books, a clear act of journalist-on-journalist censorship with horrific significance. Each one of these fearless volumes is not only a treasure trove of reportage, but a brave paean to the very notion of a free and fair press. We urge all those who want to avoid becoming complicit in censorship to buy a copy.

Yet we know we are not alone. Every day, journalists, activists, and political truth-tellers are censored for their views in a bunch of examples that we didn’t feel like looking up. While these suppressions naturally don’t compare with what we’ve suffered, they were nonetheless stepping stones on the path to the wanton annihilation of The Onion’s Twitter presence. If nothing else, we hope that our tweet announcing our Twitter ban will stand as a testament to the creeping rise of authoritarianism online, and presumably offline as well.

If you’re reading this because you clicked the link on Twitter, you’ll understand the gravity of the situation. You’ll know that we stand athwart a pivotal moment in the arc of history, when journalists and lesser Americans must decide on our collective future. We must determine whether the right to speak freely is something we value, or whether we will consign it to the dustbin of history alongside voting rights, housing rights, privacy rights, and all the other human rights that are already there and are frankly too complicated to deal with. The choice is ours—or rather, Twitter’s. Or maybe it’s still ours. Or yours? We’re not sure.

We urge our readership to stay with us as the situation develops. The easiest way to get the latest updates on our Twitter ban is by following us on Twitter.

If America’s Finest News Source can be the victim of mass suppression, no one is safe.

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