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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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My Twitter suspension is reminder that free speech is under assault

By David McElroy · November 22, 2021

The email from Twitter this afternoon shocked me. The subject line said, “Your Twitter account has been locked.”

Why?

The email said I had violated Twitter’s “rules against glorifying violence.” What? Me? That’s not possible. But the email helpfully included the tweet in which I had allegedly glorified violence. What terrible thing had I said? It was a reply to a friend’s tweet about the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

“Agreed on both counts,” I replied to this friend. “Rittenhouse was no hero, but what he did wasn’t murder and he’s not the monster some want to make him. I would’ve been happier if all the people involved that night had had the good sense to stay home and out of harm’s way.”

And that — in the eyes of Twitter’s platform monitors — is enough to conclude that I’m “glorifying violence.”

I angrily shot an appeal back to Twitter, hopeful that someone will be smart enough to reverse the suspension. But the incident is another reminder that we are slowly handing over control of public discourse to social media platforms — and we’re left to pray that these reckless people will stop being so reckless.

Let me say quickly that Twitter has an absolute right to ban me if it wants to. The company has the right to stop any speech on its platform — for any reason it chooses. Or for no reason at all.

Twitter and Facebook and all the rest are within their rights to create any rules they want. They could dictate that every user swear allegiance to Joe Biden and his agenda of widespread theft if they wanted. Other companies could demand evidence you voted for Donald Trump and a promise to support his lies.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, I don’t have any “First Amendment right” to say whatever I want on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. If you believe that, you don’t understand the First Amendment.

No politician or government has any right to censor my speech, but no private company has any obligation to provide a platform for my speech, either. Companies don’t even have any legal obligation to be “fair,” whatever you might think that means.

The First Amendment applies to governments within the U.S. It’s a prohibition against governments putting limits on what I say or publish. Courts have actually limited that freedom in some ways that are flat-out wrong, but that’s not the point here.

When you and I move our public discourse onto private platforms, we are losing our ability to control the rules that apply to us. We’re putting ourselves in a position of allowing private companies to create whatever rules they want to control the flow of public discourse.

I have many reasons to believe that social media has been an absolute disaster for society, but this is one of the most obvious. When we control our own public-facing spaces, we can say what we want. For instance, I can publish anything on this website that I want to say — and there’s nobody who can prevent me from doing it.

When you shift your public participation to Facebook or Twitter — or any other private platform — you are at the mercy of the biases of the people who own and operate the companies. And this is a serious danger to the free flow of ideas and debate.

Hours, after I filed my appeal, I just got an email from Twitter reversing my suspension.

“Our support team has reviewed your account and it appears we made an error,” the unsigned message said. “We’ve determined there was no violation and have restored your account to full functionality.”

There was no explanation about what happened. I don’t know whether someone who disagrees with me reported my tweet out of spite and some low-level flunky rubber-stamped a ban. I’ll never know.

But I do know that when I say anything further on Twitter, I’ll have in the back of my mind the concern that someone might not like what I’m saying. And whether I want it to or not, that concern is going to cause me to question everything I say.

“Are they going to misinterpret this? Am I violating some rule of theirs?”

I suspect that some people at the company want it that way.

Even though my suspension is over now, we owe it to ourselves to think long and hard about how to fix this problem. We don’t need to put ourselves in a position to have the whims and biases of a company’s monitors block us from public discourse.

Note: Seven days after Twitter allegedly restored the functionality of my account, I’m still locked out — and the company’s “support” people ignore every message I send.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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