I got an email on Tuesday, November 15 (not from Twitter) telling me that my Twitter account had been suspended. I still provide answers to a mathematical challenge on Twitter and those answers always tagged my account, so when the ability to tag my account vanished, they contacted me. It happened between the tag for my most recent answer (November 7) and yesterday, so in the last few days.
It was 134 days prior to receiving that email that I ran tweet delete, tweeted a link to this essay explaining why I was leaving Twitter, and logged out. That one tweet did not break any rules, as you can see:
Several people who think that everything is wonderful now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter suggested to me that my account was banned for “inactivity.” Guys, come on. There are accounts with no activity for years. If Twitter has changed such that not tweeting for 134 days is now against the rules, why jump right to permanent suspension? Why not make it show as inactive for a set period and then make the handle available?
Further, they did not cite anything about “inactivity” when I logged in hoping for an explanation:
So what happened? I don’t know. My best guess is a mass reporting campaign from a group that didn’t like what I say here on Substack, which potentially includes trans rights activists or radfems. The timing of the suspension was interesting, happening right when I was annoying both TRAs and radfems by defending Billboard Chris. Twitter’s lack of transparency in the past means nothing can be ruled out, though there’s no evidence either way on that.
(Horseshoe theory is a thing, people—imagine having reason to suspect that you’re the target of a mass reporting campaign and finding that the most likely suspects are the two fringe extremes on opposite sides of the same political issue!)
My friend Bret Weinstein tweeted about this absurdity on Tuesday night, and my appeal succeeded today, Friday, November 18. I believe Bret drawing attention to this insanity is the reason why it succeeded, and so quickly, as friends are consistently hearing back about their appeals only after a much longer period — several weeks at best. (Except for Gator, of course, whose appeal is going on nine months old. Reminder that he was suspended for advocating “violence” by tweeting about the old movie trope of the “glove slap,” which Twitter’s gif menu provides in abundance. Such hypocritical bullshit.)
I logged back in, updated my Memoji, pinned a tweet thread about what happened, linked a few recent issues of this Substack, and logged back out.
So my account is saved — thank you, Bret! — and I’m tying my Substack to it so that future issues will be tweeted there. That should keep it “active” going forward. But please note that I will not be reading, replying, checking DMs, etc. Nothing. I hope to be done with Twitter for good (reasons here).
If you’re on Twitter, going to my profile and finding a recent issue you enjoyed and RT’ing my tweet on it, as well as replying to it (replies boost the algorithm much more than RT’s do) is the most helpful thing you can do to support my Substack. Now that each issue will be announced there via an automated tweet, doing this every time is an extremely helpful way to support my writing.
Thanks in advance, and have a great weekend!
Housekeeping: Comments are open for paid subscribers. Email hollymathnerd at gmail if you want to participate but can’t afford a paid subscription. I’m no longer on any social media, so your spreading the link to anything you enjoy reading here is helpful and appreciated. Thank you!
You may want to do something to periodically resurface the suicide post. I liked the pinned post explainer but it should be surfaced once a month or so.
In re the inactive account thing. I have one of those that I can't login to and I have never managed to work out how to find a twitter human to help me get it back since I appear to have mislaid the password and I have no idea what the email address I used was, but that may also be gone.