No. 16 - collecting Twitter bans

Good morning!

As many of you will know, I like to use Twitter to respond to Canadian journalism. I love it because it’s dynamic and spur-of-the-moment — and it creates a living and active response to a bad segment or show. I never set out to use it in this way but as the quality of journalism has declined, it’s more and more become by go-to location to vent, analyse and criticize the news.

This morning, The Current had a segment on Roe v. Wade. In classic The Current fasion, they didn’t look at a Canadian angle, or the Canadian context, and instead stayed firmly in the US (to my genuine surprise; I thought we’d at least hear one Canadian). The segment was introduced with the enraging line that some people are feeling “relief” in the wake of this decision, setting me off for a fury of live tweeting for a segment that was too shallow, too basic and lended far too much voice to the gender fascists who want women to die.

As they were airing the opinion of some man lawmaker asshole, I got a notice saying that Twitter was temporarily suspending my account. Here is the offending tweet:

Aside from the fact that this tweet could be interpreted as ‘we should send all me out into the sea … ‘to work’ or ‘to party’ or ‘to live comfortably away from us all’ or any number of non hateful possibilities, I was also responding to a man who was blaming the pending SCOTUS decision on people who supported Bernie because they wanted their student debt cancelled. As in: if only we had voted Hilary! But I wanted my student debt cancelled and now look what has happened!

His was a bullshit take and my reaction was a perfectly reasonable suggestion (sorry men — get your Wellies on).

So now, I can’t use Twitter for the day.

That would be one thing — but these bans add up and every time, I drift closer to having my account deleted entirely. And for what? Being ridiculous?

Twitter is such a double-edged knife. It’s allowed me to bypass the censors within the Canadian media establishment, but my days on the platform are numbered. These bans only happen because people report me and there are more than enough eager shithounds who want to see me off the platform that the day will certainly one day come. So much for free speech.

So if you’re wondering why I just stopped my tweeting about this terrible The Current segment this morning, that’s why. And, fun fact: in the introduction to my book Take Back the Fight, I write about a segment about abortion that was on The Current one morning!

But way more importantly than me and my catharsis is this: this is a platform that will never tolerate it being used to organize radical action. We need to always remember this and figure out ways to stay connected that aren’t going to kick us off for a joke about launching people into the sun (I was banned a few weeks ago for saying that too) because the stakes are too high for the censors to cut our lines of communication.

Feel free to share this post!