The Vermont Department of Corrections says it believes a mistake was to blame for blocking a frequent critic from its Twitter account for months, and it’s been corrected.
Jamie Wool doesn’t believe it was a mistake.
“I don’t buy it for a second, not at all,” Wool said Tuesday. To him, it seemed more like a move by a thinned-skinned state government department to silence him.
Public officials and agencies blocking people from accessing and commenting on their social media accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter, has been raised as a freedom of speech issue in recent years, both nationally and within the state.
For example, in 2018 Gov. Phil Scott came under fire from the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and others, for blocking certain users from his Facebook account and censoring commenters. He later unblocked those accounts.
Wool sent a tweet last week questioning the corrections department move to block him from its account in March, and he tagged the Twitter account @bake135, which is used by James Baker, the interim corrections department commissioner.
“Hey @bake135 if no government official can ban or block people on Twitter how is it that @VTDOC can?” Wool wrote. “Isn’t @VTDOC a government agency? I can’t wait to hear why I was blocked by you too. That should be fun.”
Wool reached out to VTDigger about being blocked from the department’s official Twitter account, @vtcorrections, and VTDigger contacted the corrections department.
“We did see his tweet and we looked into it and he was blocked,” Rachel Feldman, a spokesperson for the corrections department, said Tuesday. “We unblocked him immediately.”
Feldman said the department is trying to find out how Wool got blocked in the first place.
“It is not our practice to block people from the Twitter account,” Feldman said. “We’re looking into why it happened.”
She added, “Nobody that operates the account blocked this person, so we’re trying to figure out how this person was blocked.”
One theory, Feldman said, is that some sort of “misclick” blocked Wool from the account.
“It was definitely a mistake; he was the only person that was found to have been blocked,” she said.
Asked if there is a department policy about blocking people from the Twitter account, Feldman replied, “There is not a policy, but an understood practice.”
Feldman added, “We’re a department that is funded by taxpayers’ dollars; we’re accessible to everybody.”
Back in March, at the time he was blocked, Wool sent a tweet reporting what had happened to him when he tried to access the corrections department Twitter account.
“That moment you find out you were blocked by a government agency for speaking the truth they can not handle hearing,” he wrote. “If you EVER needed a clearer picture of the people that run and work at @vtcorrections I present exhibit below.”
He then included the message he saw when he tried to view the department’s account: “You are blocked from following @VTCORRECTIONS and @VTCORRECTION’S Tweets.”
Wool has tweeted regularly about the corrections department and how it is operated, at times a single tweet and others as more lengthy threads.
In most of them, he is critical of the department, using strong language in accusing corrections officials, at times by name, of lying, cheating and corruption, and describing the department as having a culture of sweeping abuses under the rug.
Often in those tweets, he is referring to the corrections department’s handling of his father’s case, and steps it has taken, or not taken, to prevent his release from prison.
Kirk Wool, a tenacious jailhouse lawyer, has been fighting from behind bars for decades his sex assault and kidnapping convictions that resulted in a lengthy prison term. He was recently released on probation.
Jamie Wool said Tuesday he didn’t think it was a coincidence that the corrections department lifted its Twitter block on him when questions about it started being asked in recent days.
Blocking someone from an account is more than a one-click process, he said, and believes that shows an intention behind his ban.
“Listen, at the end of the day, I’m just glad I’m no longer blocked and I can comment on their stuff,” Wool said. “The ultimate goal for me is to literally get them held accountable for the things that they’ve done.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Mistake or intentional? Twitter ban lifted on critic of Corrections Department.