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!
I’ve been suspended twice on Twitter now. It sucks. Hope it gets resolved soon. I appreciate your voice on there.
I've gladly and proudly deleted dozens of accounts over my brief 34 years of existence.
Sometimes I even delete two accounts at the same time because of how wonderful it feels!
University of Waterloo saw several suicides not too long ago, as did University of Toronto. The purported reason: queues were too long for counseling. Are we all in a simulation, is this an instance of Two Point Hospital where the level is a tertiary education institution? Amazing how much they gripe about rigor when their careers, their work, their research, their institutions are built by a dogmatic delusion, purely to further that dogmatic delusion of superiority. I was a student there and nobody cared about anything I had experienced - we would get shunted to counseling services, sometimes with a literally flippant wave of the hand, when what was necessary at that point in time was to recognize that a dehumanized person was in their offices. I posted on Twitter that these students had been murdered and was told that I was "harassing" the university by such writing. I gladly deleted that account and have deleted several more accounts across numerous major services since.
🙂