Some Tweet-Sized Reflections On My Twitter Ban
Why I was banned (no idea), how that makes me feel about the state of free speech, and what I’m doing about it.
At the beginning of October, I discovered that my Twitter account had been “permanently suspended”. In light of Elon Musk’s takeover and subsequent firing of top Twitter brass, including Director of “Trust and Safety” Vijaya Gadde, I thought I’d share some thoughts on the experience. 1/
Character-count limits are kind of a pain to work around when composing threads, but it feels like an appropriate format for such a post, so I’ll try and write this as a thread of (kind of) char count limited thoughts. 2/
What did I do?
This is the top question I got after the suspension went into place. It’s also one of the more interesting parts of the story b/c not only do I not know what rule I broke and not only will no one tell me but it also seemed to happen gradually rather than suddenly. 3/
The first sign was when I published a tweet thread summarizing a speculative post I published on how PoW and PoS compare in intergalactic societies. Not the edgiest of topics unless you’re a hardcore PoS partisan I suppose. 4/
So I was pretty surprised when I started hearing from friends and co-workers that the tweets were showing as unavailable. This was particularly strange since as far as I knew the tweets published successfully and I could see them normally from my account. 5/
Ok. Weird. So I contacted Twitter support. This is where things got frustrating. I sent a message saying Tweets weren’t showing up but everything looked normal for me. 6/
I would then get a canned support response about how sometimes suspensions happen but it’s usually temporary and then gave me some links for me to appeal. 7/
Unfortunately this form didn’t work b/c you needed to have a suspended account and apparently mine wasn’t (yet) and I couldn’t follow up on my support ticket b/c they automatically closed it despite not actually solving my issue. 8/
I went round and round trying to get someone to address the issue, always getting a canned response and a closed ticket in response. 9/
I was still posting the occasional tweet. And was getting some engagement but also hearing that these too were eventually showing as unavailable. Again, while they now show as from a suspended account, at the time they were simply “unavailable”. 10/
One of the last tweets I was able to post was the only one that could plausibly be considered “controversial” and it was this tweet commenting on a Blue Checkmark thread recounting a wild and recent trace and track story from zero-covid China. 11/
Finally, the last nail in the coffin was another attempt at responding to a tweet on the topic of China (where I spent 6 years of life and four years prior to that studying in college, so not just trolling). That just wouldn’t go through. Not long after that and I got the message I was fully suspended. 12/
So that’s the story of my suspension. At least after this point I was able to actually click on the link support was giving me to appeal a suspension, which I followed and submitted. 3 weeks on and I still haven’t heard back, including any hint as to why I was suspended. 13/
I also read through the rules they sent me to see what I possibly could have done but nothing stuck out. It’s also easy to say that China was the trigger, but this was far from the first time I’d been outspoken on the subject. 14/
What Will I Do Next
People have suggested I start a new account or create a nym. Neither option feels very appealing to me. The idea of a nym isn’t in part b/c I don’t think I’d be good at being anonymous on social media, but also Twitter has been a useful tool for professional growth. 15/
Most of all though, it takes work to build up a following and to even build a list of those you follow and at this point I resent the idea of having to do extra work that at its core would be building content for the company that screwed me. 16/
Will I go back on Twitter if Elon Musk re-instates me?
Yeah, probably. Again, creating and building up social networks takes work in exchange for the reward. I’ve maybe started getting diminish returns from Twitter, but there’s still value in a tool for news and info aggregation. 17/
That said, I have a greater appreciation for the vulnerability inherent in not controlling your data and content. I’m not a dissident. I’m not particularly important. I wasn’t trying to stir any pots. Yet I was vulnerable to having a valuable tool arbitrarily taken away from me. 18/
Solutions
First I’d say that I don’t subscribe to the idea that speech is in some extreme peril. Personally I think anyone who promulgates this is either naive, caught up in catering to the passions of their audience, or willfully deceitful. 19/
Legally we have better speech protections than ever in the US and continue to have the best free speech regime in the world. Frankly, I reject the utopian impulse that uses evidence of imperfection as proof of failure. 20/
A short reading of American history reveals these fights come w/ the territory. What we’re seeing today is low stakes soft ball. Whether The Alien & Sedition Acts, JQ Adams’ fight for abolitionist free speech in congress, McCarthyism and the Red Scare, or the Civil Rights Movement. 21/
Ultimately, I believe that the real measure of freedom of speech is not the attempts to squash it but rather a society’s ability to speak against such attempts. 22/
Comparing experiences I had in China, such as a Uighur taxi driver too scared to speak against the government in the privacy of his own car to what we complain about here is laughable. 23/
A historical example is “Banned in Boston” becoming a badge of PR honor to help goose sales of books in other cities. Or how the cover up of the Hunter Biden laptop story became bigger news than the original story itself. This is only possible in a free society. 24/
This isn’t to say we don’t have problems. Culturally we need to resist attempts to weaken the foundations of freedom we’ve inherited. Equally this isn’t an excuse to overstate the problem since doing so can lead to the temptation we’re trying to fight in the first place. 25/
Ultimately social media censorship is a hard thing to fix b/c the real services they provide are network effects and reach. But we can diversify. Meat space relationships are important, and I’m grateful for example for the community built up at Austin Bitdevs. 26/
There’s an irony in my publishing this on yet another centralized content service. So, in the coming months, free time willing, I’d like to start experimenting with the self-hosting options e.g. provided by Start9 Labs and their Embassy System. 27/
There’s also a lot I find compelling about projects like Nostr, Sphinx, and StackerNews. There’s still a lot to overcome when it comes to the network effects, but at this point it might be worth experimenting with more sovereign alternatives. 28/
The biggest problem remains that even if you control your own data, the network is the moat that continues to make social media platforms as valuable as they are. How to crack that w/o just creating an echo-chamber is the challenge. /end
I do have some other thoughts on these points but as this is an attempt at mimicking a tweet thread, I should probably call it here. I’ll probably write about it in the future (hopefully in a more self-sovereign manner), but if you catch me at an Austin Bitdevs sometime, I’m more likely than not happy to talk about it IRL too, maybe over a Lone Star or three.
