Well, my account was suspended permanently from Twitter, after 13 years. Twitter would like to say it was verbal harassment of a fellow Tweeter (ugh), and I can’t help but agree. I told a bigot, a racist, a Nazi sympathizer, to choke on a turd.
That was apparently too much for Twitter to tolerate. After months and months of me telling Nazis, KKK, and other white supremacist groups to generally eat shit in one form or another, Twitter decided I was just too uncivilized. Yeah, sure, these guys wanted millions of people to die based on their skin color, orientation, nationality, and ancestry, and they often harassed individuals in large groups, but they had to draw the line at my retaliating.
As with most moderating systems, it’s like the old teacher at recess. Even if YOU didn’t throw the first punch, you retaliating in any way, even if defending yourself or someone else, makes you both guilty, but more likely, the bully gets away with it and you just get detention. It is the same on Twitter, a cesspool of increasingly right wing people who simply say whatever they want, and if they have a blue check mark (which means they’re a verified well known personality), they can say it twice as much.
For months, many of my fellow comrades agreed we needed a place to go where we could talk freely without fascists (real fascists, as in the “let’s murder dissenters and use the military to subjugate people) stirring shit up, because we’re all only human, though I must admit my comrades and I saw everyone as human, not just certain skin colors.
Clearly, that was too much for some.
So here I am, free from Twitter, and while I could make a new account, I won’t. I’m not going back. It has become far too toxic, and there are just way too many people who can use the moderating system to harass and destroy innocent people, and that’s what these right wing groups do, they get together, and they mass report people until they lose their account, and yeah, Twitter is automated most of the time, and so likely won’t remove the suspension, even if you appeal.
So that was an interesting thing today. I’m sad to not be able to see my comrades again, because we didn’t manage to get anything setup as a fallback, but I know they’ll be okay, and maybe someday there will be a stable, secure place for us to go and be able to work together and organize in peace.
I’ll talk to you all later,
Sarah
P.S. – Jim Jordan is a right wing, white supremacist, fundamentalist ethnostate endorsing son of a bitch.