You may have not heard of Eoin Lenihan, who has a PhD in Pedagogy and a skeletal and clunky website promoting his educational consulting services. Lenihan also has a side hustle that has him now banned on Twitter. Following the fallout from the ban sucked me into a world of red-pillers, the intellectual dark web, and the internet’s twisted cylinder debates over media bias.

Lenihan, who claims he’s been studying online extremism since 2016, was a panelist at a forum last October on radicalization at the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (the independent political party foundation of Germany’s centrist Christian Democratic Union). During this roundtable, he explained that he thought there was a gap in research on the extreme left. And so he set out to conduct a network analysis of Antfi and Antifa related Twitter accounts.

In an article he wrote last Wednesday for Quillette, he proclaimed “15 verified national-level journalists” downplayed violence by and promoted talking points of Antifa in their articles. Lenihan cited “anecdotal evidence” that there was an “overall correlation between the level of their online engagement with Antifa and the manner by which these journalists treated Antifa in their published journalism” by ascertaining that these journalists, who cover political extremism, follow a large number of anti-fascist Twitter accounts.

Lenihan’s article spread fast on conservative websites and in right-wing media, from Reddit’s The New Right, to PJ Media, Breitbart and the like, and then Lenihan’s Twitter account got suspended (Twitter has not responded to its reasons yet). It’s striking how fast Lenihan’s article took flight in right-wing media, and the news of Twitter’s action, in turn, was immediately picked up by many of the same news sources. RT ran with the headline “Twitter bans researcher who exposed journalist ties to Antifa.”