I've probably been in Twitter jail a half dozen times since my first account around 2013. Mostly, on the surface, it's been over choice of language, but it's not really clear. You don't get context-driven feedback like "you made incidental use of the R word" [think mentally slow]. Ron Paul co-host Dennis McAdams got banned by Twitter, most probably over a variation of the R word in responding to rubbish tweets by conservative neo-con Sean Hannity:
The context was McAdams had noticed Hannity wearing a pro-CIA lapel pin, while dismissing "deep state" concerns. Now one can argue mental handicap is a disability, and use of the term is considered by the Special Olympics and others as a politically incorrect pejorative. But there's no evidence that McAdams was "harassing"or "threatening" mentally handicapped people. He was making an insult joke at Hannity's expense. I don't know if Sean Hannity or one of his fans reported the incident, if an anti-libertarian progressive had been tailing him, if the PC language police reported him, if Twitter had been shadowing him with the white glove treatment or whatever. But banning McAdams over, at worst, a joke in bad taste,,is egregious. I'm sure Twitter has the tools to redact objectionable words and/or to suspend (For more examples of the suspension vs. banning process see here.) Perhaps more maddeningly, as cited above and I myself personally checked after a similar suspension, the same term had been used by dozens, even hundreds of Twitter users around the clock, all with accounts in good standing. As Justin Amash recently noted, it wasn't an issue of rules so much as inconsistent application. There's also there's a concept of general rules. For example, I never got a list of forbidden terms. never got a warning when I published the tweet, etc. And the hypocrisy is appalling, I personally see hundreds or thousands of insulting or profane progressive troll tweets daily, as bad or worse than McAdams', even insulting trends. I have no doubt there are a lot of aggressive progressive trouble-making trolls more than willing to report/target conservatives/libertarians.
In my own cases, it's different. I really don't engage in insult tweets. Don't get me wrong; I don't suffer fools gladly. I don't mince words if I think a particular tweet or meme is stupid but usually I'm making a substantive point: I say why I think it's stupid. Now others could rightly criticize, it's not what you say but how you say it, using judgmental language. Or using judgmental words isn't a good way to win friends or influence other people.What I'm trying to do in my reply tweets is to signal there are serious issues with the tweet. and I'm usually targeting the most egregious tweets But it's been several weeks since I was last in the doghouse, and I think I was responding to a Trumpkin tweet. I have noticed on a handful of cases, I've gotten an "are you sure you don't want to edit us? Most users use different language", which is new to my experience. In one case, I used some variation of "moron"; usually using a related word, like "stupid", works.
I think in a post some weeks ago I mentioned an incident explaining my annoyance with the language police. When I was a UWM assistant professor, I was conversing with a female associate professor next door when she kept interrupting me with a word mantra. It was disruptive; what the hell was going on? It eventually dawned on me she didn't like a word I used earlier in the conversation and was correcting me. What I didn't like is she stopped listening to me early in the conversation over an incidental term.
So what annoys me is Twitter has censored me over some incidental aspect of a tweet, not what the tweet is about. Suspending a relatively rare libertarian voice on Twitter doesn't speak well for tolerance. I can't tell you how many times I've seen multiple rewordings of exactly the same progressive tweet. That makes for a boring echo chamber
For the record Twitter denies shadowbanning;
Shadowbanning means that your posts or activity are blocked and don’t show up on a site, but you haven’t received any official ban or notification about it.
Twitter censuring and their AI technology will hide or ban your posts from your subscribers and the whole Twitter community. When Twitter discovers you’ve been spamming or break the rules of their policies, you receive a shadowban. If you’ve been shadowbanned by Twitter, your posts will disappear from Twitter feed and search results. So that users can’t engage with your tweets.
Project Veritas published a relevant clip on disputed censorship here; and rhis Forbes post addresses alleged censorship here. Now Twitter above does admit to adjusting one's exposure to other Twitter users based on their evaluation of your "good conduct", which is largely opaque to those targeted. Now why have I been targeted as much as I have? I don't know; I've written literally thousands of tweets and a statistically insignificant of them have been targeted by Twitter. But I got agitated enough after a handful of suspensions (along with naked threats of a permanent ban), that I dropped my account of 7 or so years and about 75 followers and for a while published my own microblogging page (which I still maintain but haven't posted recently. I decided to start up again on Twitter but to be honest I only have about 10% of the number of followers. for my original account. There have been months of 1000+ impressions daily, even times when I had over 10 monthly tweets over 1000 impressions in a monthly window with a maximum of dozens of likes and a handful of retweets. These are pitiful, even if you just compare them to Justin Amash, where just one ordinary tweet attracted over 2000 likes. Now of course, he is a well-known libertarian and former Congressman. Are they throttling my reach? Not consistently but when some tweets don't even number my single-digit followers, I have to wonder. Almost any reply to w prominent politician or celebrity seems to get at most a handful of views. But I don't really tweet for eyeballs, and my occasional, deliberate use of profanity or unpopular tweets may annoy people enough to un-follow me. That's just the give or take of the market and there are costs to violating expectations.
The fact that I sometimes write tweets with over 5K impressions and often get occasional tweet likes from non-followers proves I have some visibility on the platform, but I don't know the nature and extent of visibility.
But really the post has less to deal with my experience than with the Babylon Bee, which has been one of the three accounts I've followed (Justin Amash, George Will). When I got a boilerplate notice about alleged misconduct, I never had multiple threads/conversations with the target I have replied to hundreds of tweets; maybe I used a judgmental term, like "economic illiterate" or "political whore", but it didn't start with simply a personal insult; usually I was making a substantive point about the tweet. Some trolls responded with a personal attack. If the troll responded with a nasty tone or did not want to debate the issue in question, I might end the debate muting or blocking the troll. I've gotten a wide range of responses, accusing me of being a progressive, Trumpkin or even a Russian bot. I don't know how how the Twitter gods became aware of my "misconduct"; maybe it was reported by the target troll, maybe some self-righteous progressive "hall monitor" I don't think the tweets in question attracted more than a handful of readers; so what's the motivation for targeting me? Maybe once I got suspended the first time, Twitter itself put my account under scrutiny. As for me, I've never reported on s single tweet. It's impossible to count uncivil progressive tweets. On Trump alone, there are hundreds of tweets suggesting an incestuous relationship with daughter Ivanka and near soft porn images of wife Melania.
A decent number of my own tweets intentionally involve humor, although sometimes it's a little subtle. A lot of plays on words, sarcasm, mockery, ad libs, etc. It's part of my personality. I used it while I taught as a professor; in person, it often included elements of timing and deadpan delivery. I've blogged one of my favorite examples. I was working as a USPTO contractor data warehouse DBA; we actually worked remotely from a contractor site in Alexandria, VA. One day we're at a HR/group lunch, and the HR rep starts talking about having a St. Patrick's Day potluck lunch and reminds us to bring something with a touch of green. I said, in a low voice only my Oracle developer Indian colleague could hear, "No problem. I'll just grab something from the back of my refrigerator..." [Not really..] The developer looks at me like "I can't believe you just said that" and then literally erupts in long, loud, convulsive laughter. The HR lady is pissed that she's being interrupted and demands us to explain what's going on. He tried to retell my ad lib, but some people can't retell jokes. The joke required timing and context. When I was doing it in class, students sometimes responded with a delayed reaction. I sometimes did it in transitioning between lecture points (IT can be dry at points) I remember this one time where I delivered my line deadpan. No reaction. Well, sometimes that happens to stand up acts, too. I'm like 2-3 sentences into the next topic, and this guy catches on to the joke and starts roaring with laughter. I've got several students staring at him bewildered, like "What the hell just happened?"
So I had subscribed to the Bee some time back and have clipped some of their video clips over the past several weeks in the daily blog. A lot of their humor is hit or miss with me. I think I've published some clever ad libs, although they never retweeted me or followed me in return. So I remember when they published their (transsexual) Rachel Levine (a Biden Administration HHS assistant health secretary) "Man of the Year" award joke. I didn't know the context, i.e., Levine's sexual identity or USA Today had recently named Levine one of its "women of the year". I quickly figured out that "Rachel" is a female given name and the implication of "Man of the Year". I understand the pronoun kerfuffle and the political correctness behind sexual identity. Personally I wouldn't have made that joke--and honestly I thought they were parodying awards (I myself keep to "Man of the Year" in my annual mock award which I take in the generic, not gender-specific, meaning). I recently came across a Chuck Norris meme which better reflects my own sense of humor. The wording was something like "I felt trapped as a man within a woman's body. And then I was born". Personally, I am and have been a "live-and-let-live" libertarian. I don't think I've met any trans people (maybe one of civilian contacts at work may be one, mostly based after hearing her voice in a remote meeting); I know about my favorite economics historian being one, and I had been a Bruce Jenner fan.
I wouldn't say that Twitter's response was predictable, but I think the Bee knew it was playing with fire. I myself am more of a cultural conservative and oppose the affirmative action industrial complex. So the suspension came; basically your account is in read only mode, and you get write privileges after serving your suspension, which starts only when you delete the flagged tweet. I think I've seen different rules and tenure of suspension. In earlier instances, I think they may have allowed me to tweet, but only so my followers could see them. Not that impressions are the goal of tweeting, but trends come and go. I think they once suspended me for a full week (that may have been when I decided to drop my first account). I don't think the tweet was that remarkable but maybe they added to my sentence since it wasn't my first offense. This Twitter punishment of sticking your nose in the pee by forcing you to delete the offensive tweet reminds me of the Chinese commie practice of charging families for the bullets used to kill their family member. I could say, "Screw it! I'm done..." like the Bee did. I could refuse to delete it out of principle. But typically the tweets in question didn't attract many views anyway. Assuming I wanted to tweet again, I was willing to sacrifice a tweet. I've published thousands of tweets. I think you can count the offending ones over the past decade on 2 hands, statistically insignificant.
You do have a link to appeal if you question the decision; I read somewhere the Bee did. Personally, I don't have faith of an honest appeal process; it's like fighting a traffic ticket without witnesses on your side. The Bee got a response like "we've looked at your tweet again, and stand by our decision". As someone who has submitted articles for review, Twitter would be better served to have the user edit and resubmit the offending tweet.
Apparently Twitter responded to the Levine tweet as follows:
"We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category,” said the spokesman. “This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”
"Deadnaming" means referencing one's original given name, like if I say Bruce (vs. Caitlin) Jenner. Twittrt here, of course, is engaging in politically correct rubbish. At worse, the Bee told perhaps a joke in bad taste. but it was a joke, not "hate speech" or malicious behavior. Twitter insists they aren't violating free speech that somehow the Bee violated the norms of free speech. To give an example, when Bruce Jenner won his gold medal, he identified as a male; when his wife conceived their two girls, he was a male. If I talk about person who ran in the recall election for Gov. Newsom, I would say Caitlyn Jenner. I don't want some zealot accusing me of "hate speech".
I think an unusual aspect to the Bee's suspension was its cascading effect, with related suspensions propagated to the Bee operators' private Twitter accounts and others, including Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson. This is compelling evidence of censorship.
In a minor way, I could see Musk's move to launch a hostile takeover attempt coming. In recent weeks, the Babylon Bee interviewed Elon Musk, which I clipped to my daily blog. Musk's promise to restore free speech at Twitter had Twitter management and staff in panic. Leftist trolls worried their control of the platform was in danger, that Musk would restore Trump's Twitter account and "Make Trump Great Again".[On a side note, I had a nuanced view of Trump; I didn't like Trump, who definitely violated Twitter guidelines, was held to lower standards than me; on the other hand, I didn't like the optics of censoring the POTUS.] I haven't heard Musk discuss restoring Trump to Twitter, but it would be consistent with free speech.
I'm not sure why Musk is willing to spend several billion dollars to acquire Twitter. It may be principle or a belief that he can unshackle value that Twitter management has crippled with its policies of intolerance. As I write, Twitter has adopted a poison pill defense which is to water down Twitter stock if Musk raised his share of Twitter stock. I'm sure Musk has anticipated this and may have an alternative strategy, e.g., a coalition of investors. Sooner or later, this will end badly for Twitter management, if their investors do not see the value of Musk's bid.
