The one-man Internet traffic machine, Matt Drudge, is on a Twitter boycott.
Drudge’s eponymous news aggregation site, The Drudge Report, has one of the most heavily followed accounts on Twitter. With more than 1.4 million followers, the Drudge Report’s Twitter account can send massive surges of traffic to news sites linked on his site.
But not since November 29th, when the account stopped posting — with little explanation.
The last tweet from the account featured a link to a Bloomberg story about male birth control:
And then … the tweets stopped. Matt Drudge’s personal account — where tweets are always deleted shortly after being posted — is likewise dormant.
The apparent boycott comes after other prominent Twitter users have abandoned the platform.
Glenn Harland Reynolds, the law professor behind the popular Instapundit blog, deleted his Twitter account after becoming fed up with what he felt was the platform’s attempts at imposing political beliefs upon its users, and the negative impact it has on its users.
“I deactivated my Twitter account about a week ago,” Reynolds wrote. “I was partly acting on impulse, because the social media site had just, for no obvious reason, ‘permanently banned’ someone I follow, something that seems to be happening more and more. But I was also acting on my growing belief that Twitter is, well, horrible.”
Fox News stopped using the platform. Fox News’s Twitter handle boasts almost 20 million followers, but hasn’t tweeted since November 8th.
The news network is forgoing the easy source of web traffic after becoming upset with the platform for not taking meaningful action against accounts that threatened its hosts. The silent protest also includes the Fox Business Twitter feed, the Fox News Research account, the Fox News Insider account, the Fox News Politics account, and the Fox News Opinion account.
Business Insider reported that Fox News instructed its staffers to refrain from posting FNC content on Twitter following anti-Fox News activists gathering at Tucker Carlson’s house in Washington, D.C., and frightening his wife, who was home alone at the time. Twitter reportedly failed to delete tweets advertising Carlson’s home address, despite being notified at “the highest level” of the company. Facebook, by contrast, deleted similar posts promptly, Business Insider reports.
The Antifa-affiliated account that organized the gathering — Smash Racism D.C. — was suspended following the invasion of Carlson’s property. However, a mirror account was soon setup, which violates Twitter’s rules against sidestepping suspensions, and was able to remain active for several days, until a Daily Caller story brought attention to the rules violation.
Drudge makes no secret his skepticism of tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Recent stories on The Drudge Report have focused on Twitter’s banning popular conservative accounts, and whether its CEO Jack Dorsey lied during his congressional testimony. Notably Drudge hasn’t linked anything about Twitter since November 29th — the same day the Drudge Report stopped posting to the platform.
Grabien reached out to Drudge for comment and will update this report with any response we receive.