A fun read:
The day after I joined Hot Air (the RWEC) as a writer I was suspended from Twitter.
True story. I have been on the platform since 2008, never having had a problem. But the day after I started writing for Hot Air I was suspended for years-old tweets. Sarcasm from years ago.
Obviously somebody trolled through my twitter history looking for anything they could complain about, and found 3 that worked. Twitter suspended me. I deleted the tweets and I got back on. Those were the rules under the old regime and I wasn’t going to be silenced for being snarky 5 years ago.
Whoever complained was a politically motivated jerk, but I have more important battles to fight.
So when I read this story I had to chuckle. MSM “journalists” complaining that they have to delete tweets that violate Twitter’s TOS in order to get back their accounts.
Freedom fighters!
As you recall, after Elon Musk’s son was stalked and attacked earlier this month Twitter banned an account that tracked Elon’s jet. You can argue about whether or not the account contributed to the attack–it didn’t, directly–but you can’t argue that the whole point wasn’t to stalk Elon. The account owner himself made clear he was trying to extort money out of Musk–$50,000.
Perhaps reasonably, or perhaps in a fit of pique, Twitter suspended the account. This was hardly some great injustice, nor a threat to free speech. It was swatting a particularly nasty mosquito that served no societal purpose other than empowering a teenager to extort money from Musk. Big deal.
A bunch of immature MSM “journalists” decided to advocate for the kid as if he were Martin Luther King fighting for civil rights, and used their Twitter feeds to promote ElonJet’s accounts on other platforms. They, too, were booted (temporarily) from the platform for violating the Terms of Service–which they were. Everybody knew the rules, but they all saw themselves as Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus.
Why, exactly? Because they were fighting “the man” or something. Clearly there is no social benefit to promoting a stalking account. I defy anybody to explain how aiding what the account owner himself admits is an extortion scheme can be a civil rights campaign. It is not political speech, nor art, nor even a primal scream. It is an extortion account. Legal extortion, but extortion nonetheless.
You know what the journalists called their suspension from Twitter? “The Thursday Night Massacre.” Honestly, they did. They even put up a Wikipedia page under that name, although the name has been changed after the howls of laughter rolled in. 8 journalists get suspended for breaking known rules is a “massacre!”
In order to return to Twitter they are being required to do what EVERY account ever has had to when the TOS are violated: delete the tweets that caused the suspension. I had to do it. Everybody has to do it.
These journalists are refusing. Their tweets are sacred.
Perhaps they are penning their own “Letters from a Birmingham Jail.” They can describe the injustice of being in Twitter jail, and their brave fight for their freedom to help a kid extort $50,000 from Elon Musk.
Journalist Micah Lee did write about his exile in The Intercept, and it is a hoot.
My suspension lasted just a few days before my account was reinstated. When people visit my Twitter profile, it no longer says “account suspended,” and it looks as if I’m back on the platform. Friends and strangers alike have reached out to me saying it’s good to see that I’m back on Twitter. It’s an illusion.
In reality, I’m still locked out of my Twitter account unless I agree to delete a specific tweet at the behest of the billionaire. Several of the other suspended journalists are in the same boat. (Twitter, where the communications team was decimated by Musk’s layoffs, did not immediately reply to a message for comment.)
I have news for Michah: these are the rules we all have had to play by for almost 15 years. The only difference is that for over a decade MSM journalists and other members of the Elite never have had to play by any rules. They were “whitelisted,” which literally meant the rules didn’t apply to them.
Welcome to our world. The rules apply to everybody. And they are even fair this time, not stacked in your favor or ours. Twitter may be one of the only places left where the rules apply equally to everybody now, and it apparently hurts deeply for those who have gotten away with everything for so long.
Mainstream media journalists are some of the most self-absorbed people on Earth, and utterly ignorant about how the rest of us are forced to behave. They have the been the enforcers for the establishment and really hate being on a level playing field. It seems unfair to them.
Well I hope they have to get used to it.
