My reply:
Little did I know that less than 60 seconds later, I would find myself suspended from Twitter for violating their Terms of Service with “Targeted Harassment and Abuse”. Two weeks later, I would find out that it was a permanent suspension.
To this day I have yet to receive an email from an actual human on Twitter’s support staff. My tweet was flagged by a bot, and all subsequent communications regarding two rounds of appeals were sent via autoresponder. Adding insult to injury, I can’t even deactivate my account because a suspended account doesn’t have access to any functionality.
Welcome to Twitter consequences in the post-trump era!
Though a part of me can’t move beyond wanting to repeatedly say “F*ck Twitter” when I think about how ridiculous this whole situation is, I’m honestly okay with the suspension. Unlike my need for food, water, and tennis, I don’t need to tweet. And while my time as a tennis writer heavily relied on content views and article clicks, there’s absolutely nothing about my current job that requires social media. I’m not an influencer, nor do I want to be an influencer.
So, I’m okay with a Twitter suspension. However, nothing about how this went down was good, right, or fair. I realize that life is generally not fair, and no one has ever promised that life would ever be fair. At some point along the way, though, any human could have seen how this interaction went down and intervened on my behalf. Since that didn’t happen, this is how it ends for me on Twitter.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t equate any of this with the larger discussion of how American democracy ain’t doing so great these days. There isn’t any parallel to the suspension of my Twitter account with the efforts by republicans to invalidate votes or suppress the lives of everyone they deem undeserving of the American Dream. Twitter isn’t run by a sinister cabal of white supremacist republicans who are determined to silence my Black voice.
But Twitter erred badly on the wrong side of history by allowing years of abusive behavior by trump and his fellow republicans. That abuse directly led to the incitement of trump followers on Twitter (and other social media platforms) that culminated in the armed insurrection against our government on January 6. Their attempt at fixing that wrong has led to an environment of squashing ANY speech their AI deems abusive via account suspension, even when that speech is truthful and aims no hatred at any personified target.
For years, I’ve watched republican lawmakers prioritize their need to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else, including over 50 attempts to kill healthcare for myself and millions of other Americans and elimination of SNAP benefits for our neediest citizens. I defy anyone to tell me what was untrue or abusive about the statement, “Not rich? Eat shit & die.” Please tell me, who was my target? As I look around, the only target I see is people like me.
The Twitter AI has no sense of societal context. It’s merely reacting to a hastily-created (and badly-designed) framework of logic designed to support trump’s permanent suspension. The saddest part of all is this: by forcing Twitter’s hand in this ham-handed way, trump won. He was silenced, but so am I.
If Twitter sees equivalence between his tweets and mine, we are done.