Today my longtime Twitter account carlbeijer, where the overwhelming majority of my readers first found me, was banned without explanation or appeal. It appears that a group of Nazis did the old “mass report a tweet with a keyword that the system might automatically flag” trick.1 A few of them had talked about assaulting me earlier today and were evidently pretty mad that everyone just laughed at them about it, but how else can you respond to posts like this?
Anyway, I’m proud that my account went out on its shield, and that it died as it lived: arguing with reactionaries. Here, of course, the posting will continue as usual. Fortunately very little of my traffic comes from Twitter anymore so this was never going to hurt the blog. (Most of it does come from word of mouth and recommendations, however, so if you’d like to subscribe now or invite a friend, that would help out a lot!)
As far as I can tell this is where I am supposed to explain that my ban is the greatest injustice in the history of the world and insist that it proves the dangers of cancel culture, but neither is actually true. I have never tried to get Nazis banned on social media because I think it’s pointless; they still tried to ban me, not in retaliation for “cancel culture”, but because they hate socialists. Same with Elon. The solution to problems like this isn’t to “foster a culture of respect for free speech” or whatever; it’s to nationalize social media so that the public can exercise some minimal influence over its moderation.
That said, looks like I’ll be touching grass tonight for the first time in twelve years. Wish me luck!
Update on this: it appears to be even dumber than that. One of the larger Nazi accounts — who I won’t name here, since he wants the attention — has actually been banned several times in the past, and just used new accounts to evade the ban (in violation of Twitter’s TOS). I posted a list of those accounts, and the Nazis pretended that it was “personal information” and reported it as doxing. So in short, I was banned for pointing out that someone else was violating the TOS. Perfect example of the complete farce that moderation under Elon has been, but whining about it at this point is like sticking your hand into a blender and the complaining when you get cut.