Twitter
was a truly great place for debate before 2016.
You could meet everyone in the world, and argue about ideas.
After 2016, not so much. It became broken with woke censorship.
In 2022, Elon Musk bought it, and fired the censors.
He may have saved it. Let's hope so.
I love debate.
I love ideas.
But the Western left,
and their friends the Islamic right,
do not return the favour.
They generally despise debate,
and their contempt for debate seems to grow every decade.
Their response to opposing ideas, whether expressed politely or robustly, is often to block.
I am proud of being blocked by some of the below.
For others, I wish they would be more mature and would debate.
Who blocks me - Ireland
I am blocked on Twitter by these Sinn Fein politicians and activists:
On Twitter,
I will debate almost anyone.
Stick to ideas and I will debate you.
I want to know what ideas are true.
But I do have rules, to deal with the vile forms of human behaviour you find on Twitter.
I will not debate you (and will block you) if:
You target my job.
Angry leftists have targeted my employer many times,
complaining about me and my opinions.
They even held a physical demo against me, to try to shut me down.
My employer is a university, and I have freedom of speech.
But anyone in less secure employment might not be so lucky when targeted with these gutter tactics.
Anyone doing this gets blocked, no discussion.
You libel me.
If you declare that I am a racist or bigot,
or unprofessional at my work,
or a danger to people,
don't be surprised if I block you.
Why should I listen to your filthy libels?
Stick to ideas.
You target my appearance.
If you feel the need to tell me I am white, pasty, fat, middle-aged, look like a pedo, and so on,
like you are 12 years old, then you get blocked, no discussion.
You would not believe that adults would do this, but it is a sign of incoherent anger over opinions that they cannot debate.
Women with opinions on social media are used to this all the time, but men get it too.
You target my website style.
This also is the incoherent anger of people who cannot debate ideas.
I say: Look, here are original documents of the IRA supporting Hitler.
Incoherent reply: "Look at your stupid site. LOL."
This is the same as telling me I am ugly.
I know you are only doing this because you cannot debate ideas.
And I know you do not do this for sites on "your" side.
So I block you. You can email your CSS ideas to me. Though I will still not read them.
You report people.
Twitter Corp got hysterical about "bad" speech
starting around 2016,
and after that abusive reporting became a thing.
Twitter Corp encouraged abusive reports.
I was targeted with fake reports from
"OldDumpy",
an Israel-hater pretending to be Jewish.
It worked. I got banned because of his fake reports.
People I followed got banned all the time because of fake reports.
So I started blocking
any account that reports its enemies.
I am not sure if this era is over, but for now, if you report people, I will block you.
That's my rule.
Sorry, but it is just self-defence.
You report people for misgendering.
One topic that has been full of furious reporting on Twitter is transgender issues.
In particular, reporting people for "misgendering".
Again, I am not sure if this era is over. There are mixed signals.
So for now,
if you report people for misgendering, I will block you.
Sometimes I
search Twitter for "reported for misgendering"
and block every account that ever reported anyone.
You making a report gets you blocked.
That's my rule. Sorry, but it is just self-defence.
You post your garbage in the wrong place.
You can post garbage all year long and I will not block you, but please have some basic human decency.
If I am reading a moving tribute, say, to an innocent child killed by Palestinian terrorists,
and the first comment is some guy attacking Israel, I am highly likely to block.
If you want to explain how you hate Israel, start your own thread, and I may even debate you.
Do not post it under a tribute to a murdered child.
Have some basic human decency you freak.
You post porn.
Who on earth wants to see porn on Twitter?
Popping up on your phone on the bus!
Unfortunately there is no easy way to block it all.
If I see any, I immediately block the user.
No apologies for that rule!
You hate Israel/Jews and claim to be Jewish.
I do not want to meet another scam artist like
"OldDumpy".
There are many Israel-haters and Jew-haters trying out fake claims of "anti-semitism".
It is clever
and it works.
So
if you are anti-Israel and say you are Jewish, I will block you.
Sorry, but it is just self-defence.
The win for Trump in the 2016 election (and to a lesser extent the win for Brexit in 2016)
made social media companies go hysterical about the free speech they were allowing,
and what "bad" results it would lead to.
As a result, since 2016,
social media platforms have started policing speech.
Of course, they "police" speech with idiot algorithms and idiot workers
making random decisions.
Reporting is encouraged, and users now organise teams of malicious reports to get their opponents banned.
There are endless accounts of sensible people being banned and censored
for completely arbitrary reasons.
Including me.
Censorship by Twitter and other social media companies is probably
the dominant form of censorship in the West now.
"OldDumpy"
- I am temporarily banned on Twitter
after a malicious complaint by a troll account, July 2019.
Read the incredible story of this fake "Jew" who got me banned
for criticising violence against Jews.
My story is not unusual. Such stories are everywhere on Twitter these days.
Twitter is broken.
And it is not the fault of the users.
It is the fault of Twitter Corp.
Shortly after the "OldDumpy" ban from Twitter for criticising Islamic terror,
I was banned again from Twitter in Aug 2019 for criticising the Prophet Muhammad.
This started when that comical and devout Islam apologist
Craig Considine
made a post yet again promoting the Prophet Muhammad.
I pointed out that he was a rapist of captured women.
Twitter then locked my account and told me I am banned for a week for criticising the Prophet Muhammad.
I appealed the ban.
Twitter overturned it, and said "we made an error".
What a strange platform Twitter is.
I literally got reported and temporarily banned for saying that raping slaves and captives is wrong.
An anonymous pro-Islam user,
"Timalloy5", reported me in July 2021 for criticising Muhammad.
Nothing happened so far.
But I mention it because, as far as I know, "Timalloy5" is not Muslim.
This illustrates the sickness of the western left, that they end up simping for medieval warlords
and Islamic fundamentalism.
Deranged people.
This starts when someone posts how great it is that Muhammad was not assassinated. I make the obvious reply.
"Timalloy5", one of my "hate follows", gets offended.
I criticise the jihadi killing of a random Jew
at a bus stop in May 2021.
Simp for jihad, "Timalloy5", pops up to compare the victim to Muhammad, who also should not be killed.
I reply
that the innocent man at the bus stop was not a child rapist and mass murderer and founder of an ideology that slaughtered millions.
"Timalloy5"
reports me for "hate speech"
for saying Muhammad was a child rapist.
This kind of sums up the western left.
Twitter overturned my ban for criticism of Muhammad,
but they did not
overturn the following ban.
Sept 2019:
Ex-Muslim
Fay, The Most Gracious
draws Muhammad on YouTube.
On Twitter
she got reported by angry Islamic fascists.
Incredibly, Twitter listened to them
and banned
her tweet of the video.
She appealed.
Twitter then upheld the ban.
Here is her Muhammad.
It's a perfectly normal picture!
He's not even having sex or anything.
And Twitter listened to complaints and banned it!
Twitter is now the "sharia law wing"
of the free speech party.
Twitter is utterly broken as a speech platform
and it deserves to be replaced by something better.
My replies on a thread get hidden behind a "Show more replies" barrier, where other replies are not.
This happens with my replies to more or less any tweet.
Solutions:
I cannot reply to tweets any more.
I can only quote a tweet to comment on it.
How To Avoid Twitter's Shadowban Penalty.
This suggests that you should not engage with blue-tick accounts.
Possibly do not reply to or quote anyone for a few weeks, and the software may reset.
I did this. I stopped replying and only did quote tweets.
The software reset.
I was no longer shadowbanned.
I tried a few replies again.
I was back to shadowban again.
I have done this experiment repeatedly, including leaving it time to reset.
It always reverts to shadowban.
My shadowban is permanent.
I can never reply to tweets.
Increasingly after 2016, it looked like lovers of free debate would have to leave Twitter.
Twitter banned and censored account after account.
Half the accounts I follow were suspended or censored.
We all longed for a better place to meet.
Many attempts were made to start alternative platforms.
Twitter messing me about with two bans and an ongoing shadowban
sums up in a nutshell
why I have my own website.
Here, I can be free.
Manual experiments suggest I am no longer shadowbanned.
We shall see.
Twitter censorship goes absolutely insane,
Aug 2020.
An American corporation abusing its position to suppress speech.
Everyone involved in this censorship regime needs to be fired.
"When the fire alarm goes off at the Facebook Community Standards Office".
From here.
I'm pretty sure this is in fact an accurate picture of Facebook moderators.
And Twitter, and the rest of the Web 2.0 censor sites.
Strange young Americans, censoring the world.
Apart from the comedy of thinking I am being censored by people like this,
isn't it amazing how you look at a crowd like this and think "censors"
rather than "free speech libertarians".
But that is my reaction.
I expect a crowd like this to censor me
on a range of topics.
Isn't that sad?
Maybe someday we can make free speech cool again.
Something fantastic happened in 2022.
Elon Musk bought Twitter
and said he would return it to a platform for free speech.
Wonderful news.
A new dawn.
The head censor, the appalling
Yoel Roth,
left.
Large numbers of censors left or were sacked.
Large numbers of banned accounts were restored.
The Musk era looks good.
Though there are some mixed signals.
Twitter on github.
Musk era Twitter makes the algorithm open source for transparency.
Twitter Blue
came to my country in 2023.
I paid a subscription.
My motive:
To get out of Shadowban.
To be safe from malicious reporting by anonymous trolls.
To get more traction and visibility.
To get long-tweet function.
It seems nuts not to join Twitter Blue. But each to their own.
In 2022, we found out that the Twitter "Community Standards" moderators did look like the people in the meme above.
Here, Twitter was employing
a man dressed as a woman,
whose job was to ban anyone on Twitter who says men are not women.
What a hellsite.
This is real life, a real NBC report, not a Babylon Bee parody or a meme.
Well done Elon Musk for sacking these people.
Censorship incident on
Musk Twitter:
The Daily Wire, 1 June 2023,
posts the most censored film on earth,
What Is a Woman?,
to Twitter.
Twitter allowed the movie.
But it initially banned comments, likes and retweets.
After some uproar, and some mixed messages,
Elon Musk stepped in and the censorship was ended.
He also apparently sacked the employees that censored it.
Meta/Facebook/Instagram launches a Twitter rival,
Threads, in 2023. "Sick of free speech on Musk's Twitter?
Sign up with Threads and we will ban your account."
