On Being Suspended From Twitter
The morning of October 28, 2020 seemed fairly normal. I awakened, had breakfast, and sat down with my morning coffee to check on my cryptocurrency investments. I made my morning rounds on Twitter. And then, it finally happened; the moment I had been simultaneously anticipating and dreading for years: Account suspended.
The following, 800 strong, that I had spent over eight years amassing and cultivating was gone in an instant, as though a great fire had burned a flourishing vineyard. All of the wisdom that I shared with my audience was snuffed out, at least to the extent that they had not internalized and spread it themselves. All of the rebuttals and debunkings of Cathedral operatives and propaganda were erased, except for those published here. My easiest means of communicating with some of the brightest people present in that medium was broken.
I figured that it was only a matter of time. After all, I was no stranger to Twitter's Trust and Safety Council, the organ formed in February 2016 to suppress Cathedral-disapproved opinions on the site. Despite never doing or saying anything that reasonably could be construed as illegal or immoral, I had been temporarily shut down before for speaking inconvenient truths about pet progressive causes and groups, dealing with crazy leftists with insufficient gentleness, and advocating that necessary and proper measures be taken to suppress organized violent crime and quell riots. Part of me is surprised that I lasted this long. Another part of me wonders what I posted in the past few days that made them decide to pull the plug, as no particular reason or Tweet was given as the reason for my suspension.
My initial feeling upon receiving my Dear John letter was a guilty conscience, despite having no legitimate reason for which to feel guilt. These feelings were quickly replaced by anger and a desire to take action. A few minutes later, I filed an appeal, but there is no response to it as of this writing and I expect none, other than perhaps an eventual denial of appeal and formalization of the suspension. If I am lucky, someone will tell me which particular morsel of “hate speech” or “wrongthink” was the final straw. Now that almost a week has passed, though I still feel wronged, I have noticed a profound sense of calm and relief in my mental state. Just as a person who has never been in a fight fears a punch in the face more than someone who has taken one, I find that the fear and worrying about getting suspended is worse than actually being suspended. Of course, it would be much worse if I had suffered a coordinated attack across platforms, but losing only my personal Twitter is not nearly as bad as I had imagined.
Moreover, I have realized in the past few days just how much difference there is between Twitter and real life. On Twitter, everyone is obsessed with the news and outraged over whatever the current political leadership or their major challengers have just said or done. In my real life, this is present but not front and center. Most of the people I know in meatspace are either just trying to get through the day and feed their families, or are working on something interesting that is at most tangentially connected to politics. Twitter is not real life, and losing it presumably for all time has given me a newfound appreciation for real life. I find that being separated from the Twitter conversation has also helped me to understand in a novel sense just how poisonous democracy can be, for it magnifies the worst aspects of politics, both in amplitude and velocity. Being expelled from the Twitter bubble is its own red-pill.
I have resolved to take what Twitter intended as punishment and use it to my advantage. I will now use the time that I once spent there to focus on more productive and lucrative efforts. Perhaps I will return there someday, under a different guise, but the amount of personally identifiable information linked to that account will make doing so more difficult unless legislation is passed to curtail corporate censorship. My advice to my readers who are on Twitter is to use accounts which are completely disconnected from your true personal information, branch out onto alt-tech platforms, share Zeroth Position articles whenever the situation merits, block every ad-promoting account that you see on Twitter to hurt them financially, and work to stop corporate censorship by whatever methods you believe will be fruitful. But most of all, consider whether you need to be there at all. In retrospect, I am uncertain as to whether I did.
My own stance on corporate censorship is well-known to my readers; those unfamiliar with it may explore it here. Suffice it to say that I believe that corporations, if there are to be such legal fictions at all, should be required to serve the law-abiding, taxpaying masses as a precondition of their continued existence and should be able to deny service only to people who violate the non-aggression principle in some manner. Only truly private entities should be free to discriminate. My position on this issue has not changed, but it could be improved in presentation, which will be my next essay project.
As for the Zeroth Position Twitter account representing and promoting this publication, it will remain active and continue to post our articles and nothing else, as it has always done. That is, of course, unless and until it is shut down as well. My personal Minds account will take over the role that my Twitter once had, though I intend to reduce my output to one or two short posts per day rather than the dozens of daily Tweets that I had been sending. To make up for this, I will devote more time to my writing, which has suffered greatly in recent months. Some of these new essays may be published elsewhere as I attempt to extend my reach and reclaim some of the online presence that Twitter has unjustly taken from me.
Until next sign,
Nullus Maximus: Founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief of Zeroth Position