Twittering Classes: A Social Media Policy Update

NinaIllingworth June 15, 2019January 16, 2021 algorithm, blogger, Can't You Read, censorship, comment sections, Contact, Contact Page, email, Facebook, fascists, Mastodon, Media Madness, neoliberal, Patreon, personal, shadowbanned, Site Updates, social media, TERFs, Tumblr, Tweetstorms, Twitter

Dear Readers,

as you may be able to gather from the header I used for this notice, I don’t particularly want to be posting this update and I consider it a colossal, but sadly necessary waste of my time (and by that logic, yours.) I am in fact already having a terrible month due to a recent illness and I’m several articles behind where I would want to be at this point in June. In short, the absolute last thing I really wanted to do was burn two additional days sorting out yet another ridiculous social media problem. Yesterday morning I woke up to the following notice from Twitter:

Frankly, I’m not particularly interested in debating the merits of why Twitter decided this constituted “hateful conduct” but in my defense, the word with the star in it was directed towards a man. Furthermore while I know you don’t get a seven day ban unless someone reported you, I’m not sure it was the person this post was directed at; a former mutual follower who I’d been arguing with for a little while at that point.

Just a few days prior, a comment I’d made about reactionary TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) was retweeted into the frothing angry UK anti-trans community and I’d ended up blocking several hundred of them just to make the whole stupid thing go away; I suspect that one of the smart TERFs decided to keep quiet while monitoring my account for tweets they could report, and here we are. The other possibility is that Twitter has once again screwed with its own automated “anti-hate speech” algorithm without me noticing until now, but I’m less inclined to believe this because as I just explained the service is still full of far right reactionary crypto-fascists, to go with open white nationalists and in my past experience the automated restrictions don’t last longer than 24 hours.

This is all, in a word: exhausting. Yesterday was at least the fifth time that Twitter has severely restricted my account for longer than 24 hours and the prior four were actually even more ridiculous than this one. This is of course in addition to the constant shadow-banning, dampening of how far my posts go and periodic censorship of my posts with links back to my own writing in them – something I’m quite sure never happens to the David Frums of the world. Naturally, each of these suspensions is extremely disruptive to my work, not to mention the time they literally just nuked my four thousand follower account from orbit and forced me to start over; I got to about 3650 before yesterday’s incident.

As many readers may already be aware, I have wanted to give up on Twitter for quite some time as the increased censorship and sculpting of conversation at once made the service far less usable, while simultaneously failing to remove the abusive fascists, bigots and Channer trolls. Indeed, while this may not be a popular point of opinion, in my experience most of Twitter’s attempts to “get rid of all the nazis” have simply refined the service into a weapon that is then used by reactionaries to target the very same marginalized people these rules are supposed to protect. Virtually every leftist I know has experienced a mass reporting attack of some kind, directed by lurking white nationalists, anti-gay bigots or any number of right wing reactionary groups.

Additionally, the effectiveness of this mass reporting system has not gone unnoticed to other actors looking to shape opinions online; pretty much every time I write or comment about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for example, I’m the target of a mass reporting swarm on Twitter. Naturally, the fact that I swear like a drunken sailor even while typing makes it dreadfully easy for pretty much any small coordinated group to shut me down for a day; a situation which is complicated by the fact that I think you automatically go into shadow-ban mode as soon as someone reports you for “hateful conduct” – even before Twitter determines the validity of the report.

Of course, all of this is professionally untenable for me as a independent writer but there is also an important personal factor here. Using Twitter, even primarily just as an outlet to share my writing with a larger audience has resulted in being censored, silenced and attacked by revanchist nutjobs for my personal identity, my political opinions and the articles that form my primary source of income. I’ve been targeted as a supposed foreign intelligence asset, demonized as mentally insane and dog-piled for hours by hundreds if not thousands of accounts for stating or writing dissenting opinions that are no more controversial, treasonous or “hateful” than anything Noam Chomsky has written – and that was from people who call themselves “liberals” or the “center left.”

I’ve read my service agreement, I understand the difference between free speech rights and a legally entered contract with a multi-billion dollar corporation that is too big to criticize, let alone regulate. Still, there is something disturbingly grotesque about continuing to post free content for a social media company that openly embraces multi-million dollar political trolling operations and the weaponization of literal dead people’s identities as part of a bot network to help Sally Albright attack political speech. The power dynamics inherently built into Twitter are off somehow, and when you’re an openly transgendered anti-fascist anarcho-syndicalist that is also contemptuous of neoliberalism and the mainstream media, it just seems to me like all of those dynamics are working against you all the time.

I just can’t tolerate being a digital punching bag anymore and continue to respect myself as both a writer and a person; especially if it happens to drastically disrupt my work almost every time some fascist shitlord or blue-check think tank lanyard decides it’s my turn in the penalty box. While I acknowledge that Twitter is the only way I currently maintain contact with a large number of my online friends, the plain truth is that it’s “Hook or me this time Wendy.” I’m simply at the point where social considerations just don’t rate highly enough to keep me on the website and posting free content that Twitter then monetizes as per its largely fraudulent business model.

I am belligerently sick of Twitter.

So, What Now?

Fortunately, at this exact moment in time I find myself uniquely positioned to break from Twitter because of the amount of time I’ve invested recently in diversifying my publishing outlets and increasing my non-Twitter social media presence. In the past I was so dependent on Twitter as an outlet to share links to my written articles that it was virtually impossible for me to imagine continuing my writing without it; thankfully that has changed somewhat, although I’m still certain all of these disrupted routines will cause a (hopefully) brief dip in my readership until people figure out how to find me.

Let’s look at how this changes things for my work and online activity:

First of all, I have deactivated the (currently suspended) account @EIWBM_Cat and while I have a month to think about it, I’m pretty sure I’m just not going back. To my friends who enjoyed the content I was producing there I extend my deepest apologies and hope this article helps you understand why I feel like the decision to deactivate was largely out of my hands.

I am however keeping the Twitter account @NinaWritesStuff and for the moment, I’ve been using it to try and explain to worried friends what the heck just happened. Eventually, I’m going to revert the account back to a update and links account. You can still reach me through there and if I’m available I’ll chat a little, but I’m basically done providing content or commentary that helps make Twitter attractive to other users as a whole. If I really need to talk, I’ll just use the reply button from time to time. This is definitely the end of my “Tweetstorm” habit.

I’ve also opened up a new account on Mastodon, you can find it by clicking on this handle here: @AnarchoNinaWrites@mastodon.social. Although the service is by no means popular enough to replace Twitter, readers are welcome to use it to contact me and keep up with my writing as necessary.

Unfortunately because neither Mastodon, nor Facebook work precisely like Twitter it will be virtually impossible for me to replicate the same volume of content I’m leaving behind by closing @EIWBM_Cat. In part, I hope this is a good thing because it means I’m writing more articles (a daunting prospect during a month that’s half over and has seen me finish only two essays) but I’m also striving to find new ways to regularly communicate with my friends and readers. At the moment, all I can promise is three to five unique posts a day on both Mastodon and Facebook; we’ll see where it goes from there.

I’ve edited this website’s Contact Page to reflect all of these changes. I’ve also tweaked the top menu bar here on ninaillingworth.com to allow users to quickly find all of my offsite writing including my Tumblr image blog at “Can’t You Read“, my media analysis at “Media Madness“, my theory work on my Patreon Blog and my new de-facto social media updates site at Facebook. Although I can’t necessarily promise an instantaneous reply, I do monitor at least the comments sections of all of those sites so in a pinch readers can contact me through any one of them.

Finally, I am considering replacing the Contact Page work email I almost never check with my own personal email that I check more regularly but still avoid whenever I’m feeling an anxiety build up. The upside here is that people would find it easy to contact me; the downside of course is that some of those people will be angry crypto-fascists who want to argue about my articles and wouldn’t mind seeing me harmed. In light of the fact that there are people in my life who didn’t sign up to be threatened by neo-nazis, I’m still weighing all my options on this front – I’ll let you folks know once I’ve decided what the correct course of action is.

If I’m being honest, I must admit that I don’t really know how all of this is going to work out. Whatever independent writing career I’ve managed to cobble together online has largely been accomplished through my prodigious use of Twitter; it is entirely possible that (mostly) leaving the website will drastically hinder my ability to share my work. Hopefully, my friends and readers will find it within their hearts to share more links to my articles on social media (yes, including Twitter) on their own and through this word of mouth, organic growth I can leave my bad Twitter memories behind forever.

Ultimately however, I’ve come to the point where I’m just not going to be able to live with myself if I come crawling back to Twitter after yet another largely absurd suspension. The message from the company is clear: they like the number of eyeballs I bring to the yard but only so long as I stay within an increasingly narrow band of tolerable behavior that objectively interferes with a growing portion of my work. That is simply no longer an arrangement I can agree to, no matter how damaging refusing to do so may be for my “career.”

For those of you who are negatively impacted by these decisions, please once again accept my sincerest apologies and know that I tried very hard on at least four occasions to make working with Twitter… well, work. At this point I simply cannot ever write another post like this one again without blowing my top, so this is the way it has to be going forward. Please forgive me in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you – and let’s never do this again.