Duck Dynasty and Phil Robertson supporters were surprised to see an unsettling message on their Twitter pages, when they tried to link to “IStandWithPhil.com”, on Monday. The message read: “Oops! A URL in your Tweet appears to link to a page that has spammy or unsafe content,” which left Twitter users outraged and accusing Twitter of censorship.
The URL links to a petition that was asking A&E to immediately reinstate the patriarch of the Robertson family to the popular television show. The petition reads: “I am writing to you regarding your network’s intolerant, discriminatory, and punitive treatment of Mr. Phil Robertson, star of A&E’s #1 hit show, Duck Dynasty. Mr. Robertson’s comments in GQ Magazine are simply reflective of a Biblical view of sexuality, marriage, and family – a view that has stood the test of time for thousands of years and continues to be held by the majority of Americans and today’s world as a whole.”
The goal of the petition was originally to receive 200,000 signatures. However, the petition has already exceeded their goal and has a total of 222.264 signatures, to date. The organization Faith Driven Consumer created the petition and says that they believe that Twitter intentionally blocked the URL from being linked. However, the situation was quickly resolved, and Twitter issued an apology, saying that the site was accidentally marked as spam.
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“The URL IStandWithPhil.com was mistakenly flagged as spam tonight, by an outside organization that tracks spam sources. We have restored access and apologize for the error,” Twitter said in a statement to news site Marketing Land.
Evidently twitter dont like freedom of speech either..blocking @istandforphil
— Mike (@fishtanks4ever) December 24, 2013
Image via Istandwithphil.com