Twitter permanently bans Brian and Ed Krassenstein, who frequently shared anti-Trump sentiments, alleging they ran fake accounts and purchased fake interactions
Ed and Brian Krassenstein are banned for life after ‘operating multiple fake accounts and purchasing account interactions,’ a Twitter spokesman said.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter's ban of the Krassenstein brothers lands in a stretch of escalating enforcement: the platform had already suspended Alex Jones' Infowars accounts on abuse grounds in September 2018 (permanently suspending Infowars), purged roughly 1,500 'NPC' sockpuppet accounts posing as activists that October (banning ~1,500 election-related accounts), and permanently suspended Jacob Wohl in February 2019 for operating fake accounts (suspending Jacob Wohl).
What makes this case distinct is the target: the Krassensteins were among the most visible anti-Trump voices on the platform, so a ban citing 'operating multiple fake accounts and purchasing account interactions' shows Twitter applying its authenticity rules against allies of one side, not just adversaries — enforcement framed as integrity, not ideology.
First-order effects
- The Krassenstein brothers lose their primary distribution channel overnight, and their large anti-Trump followings become unreachable through those accounts.
- Twitter's spokesman framing — fake accounts plus purchased interactions — puts every high-engagement political account on notice that bought amplification is now an enforceable violation, not just an abuse or spam edge case.
Second-order effects
- Other prominent partisan influencers who rely on purchased engagement face a choice between scaling it back or risking permanent suspension, since the Wohl and Krassenstein cases show Twitter will not exempt either right-wing schemers or left-leaning celebrities.
- Advertisers and media buyers watching election-year enforcement get a cleaner signal about which reach on the platform is organic, pressuring the gray market for fake interactions and engagement-peddling services.
Third-order effects
- Twitter's rulebook is effectively splitting into two tracks — abuse enforcement (Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos) and authenticity enforcement (Wohl, the NPC network, now the Krassensteins) — with the authenticity track likely to matter most heading into the 2020 election cycle.
- If permanent bans for purchased engagement become routine, influence on the platform migrates toward verifiably authentic accounts, making account provenance itself a form of currency and raising the stakes of any future identity-verification regime.
The trend: Platform moderation is shifting from reactive abuse takedowns toward systematic authenticity enforcement, applied across the political spectrum ahead of the 2020 election.