Maxime Bernier's Twitter Was Frozen After Telling Followers To 'Play Dirty' With Reporters
Enforcement action was taken against his account for violating a privacy policy.
If you thought there were a lack of tweets from Maxime Bernier's Twitter account recently, you weren't mistaken — the leader of the People's Party of Canada had his account frozen.
A spokesperson for Twitter Canada told Narcity that the social media site took enforcement action against Bernier's account for violating the private information policy and that it was placed in "read-only mode" for 12 hours. That means his ability to tweet, retweet or like content was limited.
When tweets violate the rules of Twitter, it is required that the violator removes them before they can post tweets again.
VICE reported that screenshots of emails from journalists to Bernier and the PPC were posted on his account with some of the journalists' contact information visible. Some email addresses were also tweeted, which led to reporters receiving graphic emails.
According to a screenshot posted by the Canadian Association of Journalists, one of the tweets said, "If you want to write to these idiots to tell them what you think of their disgusting smear jobs, here are their email addresses. They want to play dirty, we will play dirty too."
Enforcement action was taken against Bernier's account at around 11 p.m. ET on September 22 and it was put into read-only mode for 12 hours. It became active again after 11 a.m. ET on September 23 once the tweets were removed by the owner.