Politics & Government

Salem's Satanic Temple May Sue Twitter For Discrimination

When a member of the Salem-based group asked Corey Feldman why he supported a call for arson, Twitter saw the tweet as abuse of the actor.

SALEM, MA -- Lucien Greaves, co-founder of Salem's Satanic Temple, says social media giant Twitter permanently suspended him from using the service after he asked people to report a tweet that made threats against his group. Now Greaves is talking with lawyers to see if he and his group can file a lawsuit on the ground of religious discrimination against Twitter.

On Wednesday, a woman using the Twitter handle @LaurieGatta1 posted a tweet that said the group's headquarters should be burnt down. The tweet has since been removed, but not before it was retweeted by former child actor Corey Feldman.

"I doubt nothing anymore. I have em. In Salem MA. Opened a Satanic Church last year!!! The Witches are evil. And Satanists and Cults are VERY real! W a church like this Should not exist! Burn it! Blame Hillary I don't care! It's gutta go. If anyone likes this idea they r FKEd," the tweet said. Greaves responded on Twitter by asking followers on social media to report the tweet as a threat of arson.

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That led Twitter to permanently suspend his account and temporarily suspect the Satanic Temple's twitter account. "“[Twitter] permanently suspended my account outright, [at first] they didn’t give me a reason, and they put the main Satanic Temple’s account on a 7-day suspension because it was associated with an account that had been permanently suspended,” Greaves told Newsweek, which first reported this story.

Greaves has appealed Twitter's decision. The company told him his account was suspended because of targeted abuse, and that the Satanic Temple's account had been suspended for being affiliated with a permanently suspended account.

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Greaves denies harassing anyone but did send a tweet to Feldman asking why he supported a call for arson. "The religious discrimination aspect is apparent because they would have reacted differently if it were any other religious organization," he told Newsweek. "[Getting suspended] is not something I can take lightly, because we’ve cultivated a certain audience over a certain amount of time."

Twitter declined comment on the issue.

The Satanic Temple opened its international headquarters in Salem in 2016. The group is set up as a nonprofit religious organization and has about 40,000 members nationwide. According to its Website, Satanism is misunderstood and commonly portrayed as devil worship when, in reality, the belief system preaches independent thought and using evidence-based science as a basis for understanding the world.

For more on this story, see Newsweek. Subscribe to Salem Patch for more local news and real-time alerts.

Dave Copeland can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).


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