Canned

 Well, I got canned again. By Twitter, that is. The offending post was innocuous enough - I am not the first and will not be the last to suggest that our Parliament is thoroughly broken and, being unfixable, a better remedy would be to blow the whole lot up and start over. This was the post, which Twitter insisted I delete, and then went on to suspend my account:

I very much doubt that anybody could be offended by that, especially the usual leftist complainants who spend most of their sentient lives, such as they are, screeching for the most horrific of punishments to be inflicted on the Tories. No matter the colour of the rosettes, British politics is moribund; a deadly sludge of mire and sleaze, of corruption, venality and self aggrandisement. It is not fit for purpose and sometimes, you have to move on.

Which kind of gets me back to Twitter. For a decade now, Twitter has been my family, my friends and, if I'm honest, my entire social life. Why should stating what would be absolutely normal among friends be a hanging offence? Some get away with far, far worse, harbouring as they do great hatred for all who do not share their thinking. I hate nobody - hate is such an immature response to anything - yet I get labeled a hate criminal for saying out loud what so many whisper among themselves.

Will Elon Musk change anything? I doubt it. Will I find a way back onto the platform? I'm not sure. Will Twitter even survive the decade, given that the young are uninterested, it seems, in anything which allows two-way conversation (to a point)?

Who knows. So, until (if) we meet again, stay safe, be happy and don't upset the algorithms. 

The Ballad of Reading Twitter from Gaol

It’s a cold and lonely place, Twitter jail. Here in Worldwide Scrubs, the prisoner of conscience scrawls five bar gates on the walls with his own blood, counting the days, the weeks, to his release. Okay, it’s just the one week but for what? I responded to a race-baiter by calling him a soppy cunt... and then I did it again. But hey, he is a soppy cunt; you know, one of those Lee Jasper types, who believes that blacks can’t be racist and whites can’t help it.

Not a famous person, I should clarify - I know that dropping the C-bomb on the blue-tick brigade is an instant slap on the wrist – no, this was just an ordinary Joe. But Twitter determined that I broke their rules on ‘hateful conduct’. By which rule “You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

Well, I did none of those things and neither was it purely gratuitous; the man was being a cunt about it and I told him so. If Twitter has an objection to the use of a particular word why don’t they just prevent you from using it at all? It may not be everybody’s go-to profanity but have you heard what is considered acceptable in wider public discourse today? Especially among the young... who are, we are constantly told, the future. Chaucer would be rubbish at Twitter.

But of course, banning words is the start of a slippery slope, so Twitter doesn’t do that; it bans people instead. Like the precious university children no-platforming speakers with whom they think they might disagree, social media has a poor record on freedom of expression. It’s fine to bray “Tory scum” and wish death on whoever is beyond the pale today, but call out the hypocrisy of their selective Voltairisms and banished you must be. First they came for the truth-sayers, etc.

Here rots Battsby, wan and pale,

All alone in Twitter Jail.

So, here I am, victim of my own proclivity for wading in when I see blatant cuntery on my timeline. Is this spell on the naughty step going to change my ways? Not a lot; maybe I will avoid ‘picturising’ quite so many idiots, maybe I will lay off the ‘C’ word. (See, I’m already doing it.) But more likely, as many before have done, I will scale back my prolific tweeting a tad, disillusioned by the restrictions placed on my opinions and stick to posting pictures of kittens. Watch this space... 

(In the meantime, my parody account, @Untie4len is active and flogging this blog!)