If Twitter’s appeal system for locked accounts is so great, why have I been in Twitter jail for 36 days?
For the first time in my ten years on Twitter, my account is locked for a purported rules violation. The night it happened, I was notified that it would be a twelve-hour lock. It turns out that clicking that “appeal” button is the worst thing I possibly could have done, because when you have an appeal pending, you stay locked out of your account—and over a month later, I have received no response at all to my appeal. That twelve-hour lock has now lasted 36 days and counting. The appeal process is opaque, arbitrary, and user-unfriendly; it is difficult not to also conclude it is intentionally punitive. I told Twitter they were wrong, which is apparently an offense 72 times greater than the so-called rules violation they initially dinged me for.
March 7 was the night that the Georgia state House passed a six-week abortion ban—which is for all intents and purposes a total abortion ban, since a great many people do not know they are pregnant yet at that point and even if they did, it’s on the border of too early for a surgical abortion, since an abortion provider has to be able to see an embryo to abort a pregnancy. A quarter-inch-long, six-week embryo is very tough to spot.
Georgia has not been my home in twenty years, but it’s where my roots are. At least six generations of my family are there, some among the living and some buried in country churchyards across the southern half of the state. If America is “great again,” nobody’s informed the people of Middle Georgia. Life there is not easy, for much of my family. My generation is not quite aged out of the risk of an unwanted pregnancy, but we’re getting there. The one behind us is just getting to that age. Access to abortion made all the difference in my life prospects when I was a teenager in Georgia, and it sickens and infuriates me to know that if the state’s lawmakers have their way about it, my younger cousins and their children and their children’s children will have their paths to bright futures that much more narrowed by a bunch of politicians who do not believe that individuals have a right to make family decisions for themselves.
So on March 7, when the six-week ban passed in the state House, I live-tweeted the vote, my horror and outrage growing as I watched Republican members of the chamber cutting microphones and issuing reprimands to those Democratic members—mostly women—who spoke with great passion and courageous honesty against the extreme bill. The bill’s passage that night, when it came, was not a surprise, but it was a slap in the face—as it is every time some backwards legislative chamber passes one of these bills. Your struggles don’t matter. Your health doesn’t matter. Your dreams don’t matter. You don’t matter.
Three minutes after the vote, this was my tweet:
Then, of course, I received several replies to this and other tweets, gloating over the horrifying vote. The tweets from anti-choicers I barely saw before blocking their senders; those people’s victory laps when human rights are being rolled back are even more predictable than they are monstrous. But there was one reply to this tweet that was especially repugnant. It was from a self-identified member of #TheResistance—says so right in his bio. We’ll call him @ResistBro, though that’s not his real handle. @ResistBro lives in Connecticut, and he wanted to let me know he was A-OK—possibly even a bit gleeful?—at the prospect of nearly five million Georgians being deprived of the right to make their own reproductive decisions:
Oh, HELL no.
If you have followed me on Twitter for a while, or even if you’ve seen me speak at a conference somewhere, you may know that I have a near-boundless contempt for alleged progressives like @ResistBro. The “just secede already” types. The “fuck the South” types. The “why don’t they just move” types. Progressivism is about solidarity. It is both intellectually vacuous and morally bankrupt to ignore that the South is precisely where the regressive hatefulness of modern American politics often takes a far greater human toll than in a blue state like Connecticut. Women in the South, people of color in the South, LGBTQ people in the South, disabled people in the South, poor people in the South, and people in the South who check several of those boxes: these are the people that Trumpists delight in kicking around. Because they can, you see. They can because they run many Southern state legislatures; they can because the social safety nets that are foundational to what I would call progressivism are frayed to uselessness in much of the South even before something like a total abortion ban is passed; and they can because alleged progressives like @ResistBro wash their hands of any sympathy for marginalized Southerners—much less solidarity, much less action.
If Northern progressivism isn’t for any Southerners, and clearly not for any non-progressives, who’s it for? It’s for Northern progressives. It’s for themselves, even if (…because?) they’re actually doing okay (comparatively, and for now). When Kayla Chadwick wrote “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people,” she was addressing the American right wing, but it applies just as much to practitioners of @ResistBro’s myopic perversion of progressivism. It’s punching down and it’s “fuck you, I got mine” and it’s gratuitous, gleeful cruelty—which is to say, it’s Trumpism in progressive clothing.
Oh, HELL no.
So this is what I had to say to @ResistBro, and here you will have to forgive the inconsistent formatting of the thread, because of the five tweets I sent him in reply to his unsolicited shitty opinion, three were taken offline when my account was locked—so I’ve had to reconstruct the thread here.
Within an hour, I received an email telling me my account was locked. It showed me each of the three tweets, saying each violated the rules against abusive behavior/targeted harassment, and at the bottom it said “Please note that repeated violations may lead to a permanent suspension of your account. Proceed to Twitter now to fix the issue with your account.”
I did proceed to Twitter, but can we pause for a moment to interrogate these alleged rules violations?
The saltiest thing in the first tweet was the pejorative “numbnuts.” Therefore, it is my sad duty to inform you, reader, that “numbnuts” is a apparently a violation of the Twitter rules. Is that because this particular synonym for “dumbass” is gendered male? Are nuts sacred? Was I banned from Twitter for insubordination committed against testicles? I truly want to know.
I just now did a Twitter search for the word “numbnuts.” There are lots of results. The most recent was sent a few minutes ago, directed at our so-called President, in a direct reply to one of his tweets. I have bookmarked it to check back later to find out if that user gothis account locked or nah.
Moving on.
The second Bad Tweet (fourth in the thread) includes “fuck you bro.” Is this a nice thing to say? Nope! Was this in fact a less nice thing to say than an explanation of why five million Georgians deserve to be mandated by law to carry to term every pregnancy no matter how unwanted or life-wrecking or health-threatening? I would argue also nope! Did the stranger who invited himself into my timeline to say all that deserve my niceness? That is a third and extra hearty nope from me, dawg! Lastly, and most pertinently, is “not nice” the same as targeted harassment? You know my answer.
I’ve searched Twitter for other instances of “fuck you bro.” There are a bunch of those, too. Some are jokes between friends. Some are not. I spotted one “fuck you bro” in a quote-tweet of a Twitter-verified famous comedian, by a guy who was mad at the comedian’s suggestion that a certain meme format is played out. This particular “fuck you bro” has been live for eleven hours. I’ve bookmarked this tweet for checking on later, too.
The third Bad Tweet, the last in my thread of five, contains a “trash-ass” and a “motherfucker.” I stand by both of these assessments, for the record. But to the question of rules violation: again, not nice, but not targeted harassment either. Also, uh. Are you… familiar at all with Twitter? “Motherfucker” is more common than “Good morning.”
Anyway.
It is my opinion that the harshness of the language I used to dismiss a stranger who invited himself into my timeline with an all-time Bad Take is not remotely as repugnant as the actual Bad Take itself was. I was mean to someone who literally sought me out for an oppositional interaction; he was happy about five million people losing one of their most fundamental human rights. I do not think I deserved a lock for “targeted harassment;” how can you target a guy who got into your mentions to argue with you? @ResistBro isn’t even the first guy I’ve harshly shamed for holding this particular shit opinion: “screw people who live in states with a greater proportion, though not a greater number, of conservative residents than my state” is far too common an attitude and I really do need folks who call themselves progressive to do better. Now, you may disagree; you may think “you went too far, why I almost broke my pearls I clutched ’em so hard, you definitely deserved that lock!” But I would hope we can all agree that if Twitter’s going to have an appeal process, it should have an appeal process. As far as I can tell, however, it does not.
Here is what the “appeal process” has looked like for me so far—I’m going to document it in fairly excruciating detail, since there is zero information on the internet at all about what the Twitter appeal “process” looks like, and maybe this post will be useful to someone else later even if I personally never tweet again.
When I got the email and proceeded to Twitter, I got a screen again showing me my Bad Tweets, labeling them all as targeted harassment, and then it said I’d either have to take a 12-hour lockout from my account or I could appeal. I’ve never been locked, and I was curious to see the process, and also the lock was bullshit, so I clicked the button to start an appeal.
The first thing I learned is that they only give you 160 characters to explain yourself. Not even the length of a tweet. You’re out of luck for relating any backstory more complex than, for example, “My tweet was directed at the 74th sock puppet account of a Nazi who’s been stalking me on here since 2011 with no thanks to Twitter’s so-called Safety department.” Actually, even that is too long—161 characters.
The second thing I learned is that once you click that button you are committed. There’s no canceling. I looked for a way, didn’t see it, figured I’d wait the 12 hours and come back to see what Twitter looked like then. It just looked the same as when I closed the browser window:
So at this point I sent the appeal, because I didn’t have a choice. I don’t think I remembered to save what I typed in. 160 characters of “are you actually serious right now,” I’m sure.
I got an email confirming the appeal was sent.
Notice how both the on-screen message and the email say they’ll review my account “as soon as possible.” I don’t know what I expected that’d look like, but I know I didn’t think it’d be 36 days.
Did you notice also how the initial lock notification said I could send DMs during the “twelve-hour” timeout? Yeah, that doesn’t apply while you have an appeal pending. I can’t access any part of my account at all. I couldn’t so much as cancel my account right now if I wanted to. If some right-wing troll army wanted to scour my tweets for things to manufacture outrage about, now’s the time, because I wouldn’t even be able to put my account on private. Not that I’ve ever done that, no matter how bad the trolls get—and they’ve been real bad at times. But some people do, to protect themselves when things get hairy. I do not have that option, because I had the temerity to tell Twitter, 36 days ago, that they were wrong.
Once I submitted, going to Twitter.com would only show me a screen that says “Thanks for your appeal. You appealed 3 Tweets,” followed by my Bad Tweets, followed by a note that says “Please note that while we review your appeal, you won’t be able to access your Twitter account. We’ll take a look and will respond as soon as possible. If you’d rather just delete your tweets, you can cancel your appeal,” with a link to cancel—which I did not click because I’m not deleting shit. This is the first indication given that the whole “you can still DM” thing no longer applies. The only other links or buttons available to me are to change the language I’m viewing this message in, or to log out of Twitter.
Two days after I submitted, something happened that I thought was a glitch, and now I’m not so sure. I went to Twitter.com again (because they did say they’d “respond as soon as possible!”) and the “Thanks for your appeal” screen that I’d been seeing was replaced by that “We’re almost ready to send your appeal” screen again. As if I hadn’t already appealed. I submitted another, because literally there’s no other option from this screen, and got another email confirmation identical to the first. Now I could see the “Thanks for your appeal” screen again. It stayed that way for about the next 28 days. But then, last week, it went back to the “We’re almost ready to send your appeal” screen. I let it sit, to see if it would go back to knowing I already had appealed—twice. It never did. Just now, today, Day 36, I submitted yet another appeal. Or maybe I submitted five or six of them. Because now I never get to the “Thanks for your appeal” screen. It’s just an endless loop of the dead-end “almost ready to submit your appeal” screen. I’m not even getting the canned “we received your appeal” email trying to resubmit today.
So that’s the current status. I am completely locked out of Twitter, because I was mean to a stranger who got into my mentions to argue with me, and, despite sending an appeal 36 days ago, I don’t know if my appeal is merely sitting in a ridiculously long queue or if their system keeps eating it or if there’s some Twitter employee who is secretly a member of the “free speech is just for Nazis” brigade and who is nuking my appeal requests while cackling maniacally. I just don’t know. And I don’t even have the option to cancel the appeal and delete my Bad Tweets. Not that I would. I have been targeted by too many tweets calling me a murderer or suggesting that I myself should be killed—the vast majority of which got no action at all from Twitter’s “Safety” team—to submit to deleting my “numbnuts” or “motherfucker.” I recently had a couple of friends targeted by a genuinely scary account that existed to gin up anti-Semitic harassment brigades against Jewish Twitter users, a number of new targets every day; that account eventually got suspended after a series of locks and I noticed that somehow he never had to delete his tweets in order to come back after each lock. My friends’ faces were still there on his account until the day the account was finally gone. I am not deleting shit.
On Day 23, I submitted a Twitter tech support ticket under the “login issues” category to ask if they were ever going to look at my appeal. I got back a confirmation screen saying “We are usually able to respond within a few days, but some issues may take longer,” and a canned email that looked very official, with a case number and everything (#0109609987, for the record). I have had no response.
My account was locked just a few days before the March 10 National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers. On that day, I would ordinarily post tweets explaining why that date is important—because on that date in 1993, the American “pro-life” movement killed their first abortion doctor. I signed up for Twitter in 2009 in the days after they killed their eighth. Between those dates and since, the violence has not stopped. Even since I put together my 100-tweet thread of examples in 2015, it continues. Just this week, a woman in St. Louis pleaded guilty to federal charges for threatening to “blow Up ALL [Planned Parenthood] FACILITIES AND CUT THE EYES OUT OF [THEIR] DOULAS.” I’d’ve tweeted about this too, if I could have. I can’t even tweet about the award I’m getting from Planned Parenthood tonight (sorry, abortionistas; I hope and trust that you sold a whole bunch of tickets without my help). The reason that I make noise, on Twitter and off, about anti-choice hate speech, harassment, intimidation, harassment, and violence is because America has a domestic terrorism problem, and anti-choice toxicity is one of the most mainstream enablers of that problem. I think it’s important to say that and keep saying it. I will continue to say that and keep saying it. I don’t intend to be particularly polite or deferential about it, and if Twitter’s expectation is that I be polite or deferential to toxic people, even when they come for me first, then I will not be on Twitter.
All of this is infuriating in its arbitrariness, but it’s also pretty much fine. Today is the 349th day of a road trip I’ve been on with my two Siberian huskies, seeing America’s mountains and rivers and 23,000 miles of roads (so far). I’ve been documenting our travels on Instagram, and I am here to tell you that Instagram has way more dogs than it does Nazis, which isn’t a thing you can say about Twitter. Meanwhile, I have been building various permutations of online identity for myself, then walking away from them when they got tiresome, since 1994. If someone at Twitter recognizes how incredibly, incredibly disproportionate the punishment for my “crime” has been or how broken the appeal process that they were bragging about just last week is, and reactivates my account, then I’ll come back, at least until I get tired of it. But if my Twitter account is never active again, if #numbnutsgate was the end, then oh well. I was here before Twitter. I will be here after Twitter. Twitter is not the work. Twitter is not the world. I am excited to see what replaces it. I’d say it’s just about time. I’ll meet you there when it happens.
Meanwhile, my Twitter account “looks” live — they don’t put a suspension notice up if you’re “only” locked — which means that people don’t even know to come looking for me elsewhere. So, for posterity, let me just say that michellekinseybruns.com is a domain that I own, and while it’s pretty out of date right now, I promise to get it updated and keep it updated with how to find me in the post-social-media digital apocalypse, which is a thing I had been thinking a lot about even before my Twitter account got locked. We’ve all gotten used to assuming that our people are all on some platform or another, but no platform is forever. Make sure your people have your email address, maybe even your snail mail address if they’re really real ones. Social media radically changed the entire nature of social connection, and its collapse will change it again. Hang on to the good people, and stick together to keep fighting the bad ones. You have my blessing if you need to bust out a “numbnuts” or a “motherfucker” to do it.
