Garry Newman, founder of Facepunch Studios and creator of the wildly popular “Garry’s Mod,” a modification of the game Half-Life 2, was suspended from Twitter yesterday shortly after posting a string of tweets about an encounter with a Muslim man during a trip with his daughter.
On his blog, Newman explained that he was initially concerned after a Muslim man asked to hold his daughter, but went on to explain that his initial fears were overcome.
Shortly after the series of tweets, Newman found himself locked out of his account. On his blog, Newman speculated that the “Muslim Mafia” might have found his tweets and reported him.
He also jokingly suggested that hackers had taken hold of his account and violated the terms of service, or that Notch (the online moniker of fellow games designer Markus Persson) had used his “wealth and influence” to have him suspended.
However, in an email to Newman, Twitter informed him that his account had been suspended for “nude or pornographic pictures” in his Twitter profile and/or background.
The guilty picture? A screenshot from one of Newman’s games, Rust, depicting a naked man with his back to the camera. According to Newman’s blog, the picture had been on his profile for over a year without causing any problems — until his tweets about the Muslim man.
Newman’s experience is remarkably similar to that of a fellow games industry figure, former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern, whose Twitter account was briefly suspended after he made a series of tweets arguing that radical mosques should not be exempt from NSA surveillance.
Similarly to Newman, Twitter claimed that an image on Kern’s profile, featuring fully-clothed anime girls, was “pornographic” and the cause of his suspension. Following a Breitbart Tech article, Kern’s account was restored.
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