I’m in Twitter jail because turd TERFs gonna TERF
This heatwave is starting to get to my brain. I’m unable to concentrate and I feel weird. Sitting in a hot room all day, drinking coffee — what would be ideal in February just might kill me today. Every time I need a mental break from what I’m doing, I switch to Twitter. My desktop computer is a 2009 Mac and everything has aged out on it … normal tasks leave me waiting five to ten seconds, where normally I hop over to Twitter to see the news. Except today. I’m at like hour 20 of being locked out of Twitter. And I feel it. Or, I’m feeling it.
Twitter is a trash platform full of trash individuals, trash bots, trashbots and trash ideas. But it’s also my lifeline. It’s become my news aggregator. As a lone freelancer with no officemates, Twitter is my link to the outside world.
It sounds pathetic, but it isn’t — freelance life is lonely. Solitary. I feel so far from the days when I shared an office with a guy who said he was allergic to lights (and tried to force us to work in the dark), or one of my favourite people, who would turn around and gossip about everything: our work, our colleagues or the news; both broke up the workday in mostly welcomed breaks.
It’s been years since I worked in an office: 6 exactly. Twitter has grown to fill that gap. And, despite the trash, I love it. I love being on it and honestly, I love checking out of it when I’m away from the daily grind.
But Twitter jail? This is some bullshit.
My favourite Twitter people spend a lot of time in Twitter jail. Red Indian Girl has been in Twitter jail so much that she’s currently in indefinite holding for having dared to insult Nazi Barbie Ann Coulter.
I’m in Twitter jail for a tweet that was replying to serial harasser Hailey McFail (not quite her real name), who has sent me hundreds of comments on Facebook and Twitter over the past five months. I’ve never sought Hailey out for debate or conversation. In this round, Hailey accused me of being a terrible mother, in a twitter thread that was full of racist tropes and insults to me about my skills as a mother.
For me, this one is off limits. A common troll tactic is to smear women as bad mothers and threaten calling Child and Family Services, and I’ve been threatened with that dozens of times these past months. I have an instinct to kick this rhetoric right in the throat when I see it.
Here’s the thread. After some foolishness, there’s this:
Followed by me quoting McFail thusly:
And then this, where my reply has offended Twitter’s central borg.
Feel free to search both Twitter handles if you really want to fall into the void of what my life on Twitter really is like.
McFail is a well-known hater of humans, an obsessive weirdo who needs an IRL intervention because her online interactions are a cry for help. And, she’s snuggled right into the world of extreme hatred for Transwomen.
This world is organized. They’re the Incels of women who cause real danger to Trans and non-binary people. And they call themselves TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminists). That’s what they call themselves.
Now, because the balance of the universe’s forces favour good over evil, TERF is rarely used without another word in front of it: goddamned TERFs, hateful TERFs, asshole TERFs, and so on. TERFs have managed to convince Twitter’s algorithm that TERF is a slur against TERFs. It’s like saying that calling myself a feminist is a slur because so many Internet men usually say: goddamned feminists, asshole feminists etc.
And so, here I am defending myself against someone who has been harassing me consistently for months, and asking why TERFs seem to have this similar trait (they swarm like few other movements are able to), and I’m in Twitter jail.
I reported this whole thread. It was relentless. She brought my partner into the mix. She made comments about me that are straight up lies. I know she exists IRL so it feels way worse than so many of the anonymous trolls who do this on the regular. But Twitter didn’t find that they violated she of their rules. My above post did.
I can’t see anything on Twitter that isn’t a full screen asking me to delete my tweet, which I might. I’m waiting to hear from Twitter about an appeal. Until it’s sorted, I’m in Twitter remand.
Abusive behavior on Twitter is easy to see: obsessively tweeting at the same person or persons should be enough for Twitter to intervene and see if this is a conversation of two people in love or, what’s more likely, it’s harassing behavior. The remedy really shouldn’t be to delete the offending tweet, which scrubs the harasser’s history of abuse. It should flag the individual and watch for obsessive behavior, and intervene when it crosses some threshold that is, I dunno, four standard deviations from the norm of how people use Twitter.
Do you know how many reports it took to remove several accounts impersonating me? I don’t. I forget. I received at least 15 messages from people who all reported these accounts when they surfaced and it took weeks, and many, many reports. And still, there are pathetic dudes out there impersonating me.
My Twitter feed has mostly gone to the dogs, thanks to me being flagged as an enemy to the global order of the Fash. But still, I’ve made wonderful connections and friends on Twitter and this past 24 hours has been more isolating because of it. And in writing this piece, I’ve only checked Twitter 17 times, each time reminded that I’m still locked out.
So, yeah. I’ll see you soon, Twitter.
p.s. for catharsis
– it’s horrible how many people have died in this heat. At least 33 so far in Quebec. Please, please: give up your cars, occupy a bank for investing in the tar sands and keep cool
- The Current this morning was a must-listen, not only for the master class given by George Elliot Clarke about slavery and racism in Canada, but for how ill equipped White Canada is to have this debate
- Quebec City turned off their splashpads last night at 9:00 PM which is an injustice. They should be on all night (you physically have to turn them on, so it’s not like it would waste water). Also, the pool was closed because someone took a dump in it, leaving about 100 people in their bathing suits to run for their lives when the whistles blew
- I just got an American paycheque and again I laugh in the face of Maclean’s magazine, again
- please stop eating meat. If the horror of this heat and its relation to factory farming is lost on you, understand that there are two amputations PER WEEK in the United States of workers at meat processing plants. Two. Is that more than people who lose limbs in America’s ongoing wars? It might be, but because I’m mimicking Twitter here, I’ll let that idea hang
- bravo to the folks who were stopping tankers off the West coast. Heroes.
- check out my latest for the National Observer: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/07/04/opinion/vulnerable-patients-were-easy-prey-ontario-serial-killer
Update 1: here are some of the guys who reported this tweet. They’re claiming that it’s related to what I wrote about Humboldt, but it’s not, according to Twitter.
Each of these guys are obsessed with how much they hate Trudeau.
