Twit No More

September 8th, 2018

No Twitter Zone.

For just shy of a decade, I've made use of Twitter. I found it sort of silly at first, and mostly just used it to amuse myself. In time, though, I found myself spending more and more time on the site, talking with a few like-minded folks, and poking insufferable ingrates now and then when they were really asking for it. It was a good time, and fun was had by all.

But recently, I've noticed the change. Of late, conservative nitwits have been bleating that they've been increasingly 'censored' on social media sites. This is stupid on its face, as, last time I checked, neither Facebook nor Twitter nor any of these other entities are owned or operated by the United States government, and thus 'censorship' is an inapplicable charge.

After all, I can't force newspapers to publish every letter I dump in their mailbox, nor can I make television stations air whatever videos I feverishly record. No, the rules are the same. Why should a site be forced to pay for the retention and transmission of content they don't want to? Why should they be prohibited from enforcing their terms of service?

And yet. So shaken by these charges, and then being dragged before the government to testify at a congress that is utterly ignorant of how technology works, Twitter has been bending over backwards to seem like they aren't unduly punishing conservative 'voices'. In fact, they have been letting these idiots run roughshod over everyone else, saying and doing anything they please.

And I'm tired of it. It's not that I can't effectively argue and mock into submission the morons that plague me on the site. I can give much better than I get about ninety nine percent of the time, but I won't stand for the rules not being enforced equally across their user base. That implies an uneven playing field, one that is tacitly balanced towards the worst trolls on the site.

This came to a head just a few days ago, when I repeatedly reported several users for directing bigoted comments towards myself and others, and then for threatening violence against my person. Twitter deemed that, 'in the context of the conversation,' their rules weren't violated. So, apparently, Twitter thinks that some hate speech and death threats are perfectly reasonable.

And this is the same site that, a few months back, suspended me for mocking the ludicrous 'flair' and fake medals that the former Sheriff Clarke wears, because I 'hurt his feelings'. If inflicting butthurt upon conservatives is an offense worthy of suspending their users, but conservatives issuing literal death threats aren't, well then, you've built yourself a web site for Nazis.

They even admitted to this before congress!

I'm not about to participate in such a vile enterprise. As such, I'm extricating myself from the site. I've grabbed a tool to delete just about everything I've published to the site, even if the Library of Congress has kept a back-up copy of such. The point is I'm leaving almost nothing for Twitter to make use of, in and of itself, that they can use to profit off of myself. Save for a few posts I seemingly can't delete.

And, naturally, a link to this Jerk.

firebomb@obnoxiousjerk.com