No, Twitter did not remove me, but they imposed a 7-day suspension, probably for using the word "retard" in a reply tweet (discussed below). This was probably the third or fourth suspension over the past year or so, and I'm fed up. This is an issue with Twitter management, and I'm not interested in appealing the absurd suspension. I have no doubt I'm just one of a pattern of libertarians and conservatives who have been harassed, even evicted (Daniel McAdams comes to mind) by the PC elitists on Twitter. (See here and here, for example.) There are literally thousands of "progressive" trolls who daily write things hundreds of times more offensive than anything I've tweeted, but Twitter Mommy doesn't sanction.
In my case, I usually don't send out personal attack tweets; that's not to say I've suffered fools gladly, but usually I'm trying to make a point; I'll sometimes use colorful language more for dramatic effect, like the notorious Cher slap across the face in 'Moonstruck', arguing for the troll to snap out of it. Now others might say that I'm not going to win friends and influence people by being blunt, using negative words or profanity, which is a reasonable point. I've sometimes pointed out a conversation I had with this senior faculty female MIS professor at UWM, who kept interrupting me, repeating a word. It eventually dawned on me she didn't like my choice of words earlier in the conversation and wasn't paying attention to the substance of what I was saying. So that's a fact of human nature: people are going to bring their own conversational expectations into an encounter, and other people's behavior are beyond one's locus of control. In part, most of my adversarial encounters on Twitter involve progressives with cartoonishly over-the-top, badly toned tweets, and I want to send a message that there are other voices out there. There are too many progressives out there for me to waste my time correcting everyone; I'll sometimes pick one randomly to set an example.
What happened in today's incident was I was scanning down one of the typical anti-Trump trends. This one idiot was making reference to the Russian bounty on US soldiers in Afghanistan allegation. Now keep in mind: I'm Never Trump. The troll phrased things in a way of accusing Russians of murdering US soldiers. (Now I've been beating the drums for some time now, arguing if you're going to criticize Trump, criticize him for not getting us out of Afghanistan already.) These progressive trolls seem to be agitating for a military confrontation with Russia, which I think is very dangerous. So I wrote a tweet along the lines of "Dude! The Russians aren't killing US soldiers; Taliban militants are, and they've been doing it for years without a bounty." So I had moved on to other tweets, when all of a sudden I found myself locked out of my account. They demanded me to remove the tweet in question to start a 7-day suspension during which I would not be able to tweet or do much of anything other than direct messaging my followers (which I haven't done in over 7 years). This was literally the straw that broke the camel's back. I had published something like over 22,000 tweets, and I'm not going to walk on eggshells, so the Twitter fascists are accommodated. It's censorship, plain and simple. They're a private company, not the government, so they can do it. But I'll be damned if I publish content which attracts readers and have to put up with company harassment. I think it's the second time they imposed a week-long exile (and typically there's an actual or implied threat if I continue in my nefarious ways, I will find myself removed), the others were more like day suspensions.
I'm a stats junkie, and technically my readership has probably never been better. I had an implicit objective of attracting at least 1K impressions daily, but not at the sake of tweeting for the numbers. Even though I had 76 followers, that didn't mean I could get there, say with 14 tweets. Many tweets barely break double-digits. It always surprised me when I had a breakout tweet; it never occurred to me in writing a George Washington tweet over the weekend it would attract almost 8000 views. Or the one a few months back that did four times better. There have been a handful of times my daily total went under that daily objective, but I was in a long stretch over weeks averaging better than that, more like twice that number recently.
Now many people do well over that, and I don't know how other libertarian-conservatives do. But take into consideration I knew only 2 of my followers, a Navy buddy and a nephew. So most of the others followed me, mainly on the strength of my tweets.
I haven't decided what to do yet, but it looks like my popular social media digest posts I've been lately publishing on Sundays will change, likely in nature and frequency. I still have a Facebook account, but I normally accept only family and friends (although many posts are publicly available). I may resurrect one of my other blogs I started during the last week-long suspension. I will probably make an announcement in my daily blog and/or in the blog's announcement tab.
Now I've never had Trump's obsession with Twitter, but in fact I've probably spent too much time on Twitter the last several weeks. So it's time I've taken a long overdue break. I don't rule out a return to Twitter one day, but it'll probably be using a different account handle, and the account will likely take a different approach
