Kathy Griffin says she had planned to leave Twitter ‘after the midterms’ before being temporarily banned

Kathy Griffin stated in an op-ed Newsweek that she had planned to quit Twitter after the midterm elections before Elon Musk temporarily banned her from the site.

Griffin was initially banned from Twitter over impersonation and her account was reinstated only a few days later.

“I was planning to leave Twitter after the midterms because it had just gotten too ‘Musk-y,’” Griffin wrote in an op-ed for Newsweek.

Citing the fact that Musk reinstated multiple banned accounts, such as former President Donald Trump’s, Griffin said she didn’t want her name “in the company of white supremacists like Trump.”

“He then tweeted a ‘joke’ about me, before deciding on November 18 that he would reinstate me with, wait for it, Jordan Peterson and Babylon Bee. He even name-checked Donald Trump in the same tweet. Musk misspelled my name, on purpose, I guess. That doesn’t bother me, but please, Elon, don’t put my name in the company of white supremacists like Trump,” Griffin wrote.

Griffin said that she is now exploring other social media platforms.

“So, I contacted the folks at Post, the new social media app, and I’m there now. I’m also trying TikTok and we’ll see if a new type of Twitter emerges, because I do like having a platform that is more word-oriented,” Griffin said. “I was shamefully addicted to Twitter, it was hard for me not to keep checking it. But I do feel saddened, because whatever this ‘Hitler 2.0’ situation that I feel here we’re dealing with, it’s so pervasive.”

In the op-ed, Griffin discussed the lack of forgiveness on social media – specifically about when she was criticized for the 2017 photo where she posed with the (fake) bloody decapitated head of Trump.

“What I miss most, and what scares me about comedy in general, is the loss of context and nuance… we’re in such a time, exacerbated by social media, where we really have this universal lack of forgiveness,” Griffin wrote.

She added in relation to the 2017 photo: “[People] didn’t know where I was coming from. I get frustrated because I feel like people don’t want to know the origins of something.”

She then went on to discuss “getting canceled and its effects.”

After explaining the massive backlash that the 2017 photo caused, including losing gigs, friends, and being investigated by the Secret Service, she said that she “just laughed it off.”

“In fact, I actually did in a phone interview right away where I said, ‘I’m not apologizing.’ I’m grateful it didn’t run, because at that time, I heard Democrats were thinking that I was going to cause American servicemembers to be beheaded in Syria. Way to keep a level head.”

She added later in the article: “You may think my photograph was disgusting, that’s fine. But I wasn’t dressed as a jihadist as it was manipulated in Iran. It did not incite one single person to grab a sword and cut off anyone’s head, much less Donald Trump’s.”

She also called out Dave Chappelle for “making fun of cancel culture,” saying that he, and others like him, didn’t know what they were talking about.

“It’s frustrating for me because Chappelle, Joe Rogan, Kanye West and Elon Musk; none of them have ever been canceled or erased, they need to calm down. Do they need clarity on what this looks like when it’s real? It’s five and a half years of lost income. It’s two million dollars in legal fees. Those dudes, they all b**** about it, but they have no clue. The misogyny is staggering to me,” she wrote.