Banging your head against a brick wall, AKA Twitter moderation

 

I've just been taught a slightly annoying, but worryingly instructive, lesson.

Contrary to my New Year's resolution, I'm probably still spending more time on Twitter than I ought. Then I got this message:

Hi Andrew King Your account, *******, has been locked for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically for: Violating our rules against promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm.

Oh boy. What terrible message had I posted? Well, here's my offending tweet, in all its gory glory:

I guess deciding to *stop* repeatedly banging your head against a brick wall doesn't actually count as a policy. 

But it would sure feel better than continuing to repeatedly bang your head against a brick wall.

OK. Well, you could argue this was a facetious reply (judge for yourself: screenshot in the context of the tweet I was replying to at the bottom of this post).* And, sure, it's a clichéd metaphor, so I should definitely hand myself in to the style police.

But "encouraging suicide or self-harm?" Seriously? Even if you were totally unfamiliar with the idiom and took those two sentences literally, the literal sense is that banging your head against a brick wall is a bad thing and stopping this activity would definitely feel better.

Anyway, I was given the options of deleting the offending tweet or appealing against the suspension, so I appealed. After all, I figured, some key words had probably been picked up by an algorithm, so if I appealed, presumably an actual human would look at the tweet and realise that it had been flagged in error?

 Wrong, apparently:

 Hello,    

Thank you for your patience as we reviewed your appeal request for account, *******, regarding the following:

Our support team has determined that a violation did take place, and therefore we will not overturn our decision.
 
You will not be able to access Twitter through your account due to violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically our rules around:

Violating our rules against promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm

In order to restore account functionality, you can resolve the violations by logging into your account and completing the on-screen instructions.
 
Thanks,

Further violations will lead to suspension of your account.  

Twitter

So I ended up deleting the tweet to get back on the platform. Annoying and slighly worrying, in the sense that another innocent metaphor could see me banned from the platform, which would be irritating, given that I've done nothing wrong, but I'll live.

But what makes me slightly more than irritated and more like angry and concerned, is the context. Moderation, after all, is there for a reason. There are genuinely anti-social, threatening, harrassing, violent messages, hate speech and, yes, actual messages which really do promote or encourage suicide or self-harm.

I know that because, like almost everyone else on Twitter, I've seen some pretty unpleasant stuff.  For example, one of this individual's tweets popped up in my timeline the other week:

 Yep, a real life, out and proud white supremacist Nazi, praising George Lincoln Rockewell, an actual, if clownishly ineffective, Nazi. I had a look it this account's feed and reported a few genuinely dodgy tweets. With, as far as I can tell, no result at all. 

Twitter may be cool hosting white supremacists and Nazis, but props to Linktree, a social media landing page which, old fogey that I am, I hadn't heard of before, but which at least has the gumption to kick creeps like this off its platform. Here he is whining about it:

Sadly, Blogger and YouTube, like Twitter, apparently still seem to think that this sort of content is OK (Odysee, like Linktree, is a thing I'd not even heard of but, as for Gab, we all know that like Parler it's just a sewer of conspiracy theories and far-right wingnuttery).

 So there we are. Use a perfectly normal English idiom on Twitter and risk having you account permanently deleted. Be an actual Nazi-supporting white supremacist with an account that exists to direct hate against minorities and your political opponents and Jack Dorsey's minions apparently see no problem at all (ditto the people at Google who run YouTube and Blogger). Something is very much not OK here.

What's going on? Is it that, for all their "community guidelines", social media platforms have a vested interest in keeping extremist clickbaity accounts alive, because controversy drives engagement and grows the platform? That would explain why it took so long for multple breaches of community guidelines by individuals like Katie Hopkins to build up to a Twitter ban, much engagement and hate having already been generated before any action was taken.

Apparently, all it takes is provocation-driven engagement and the brass neck to deny what you quite obviously are to keep the Twitter police off your back:

Anyone with eyes, and/or ears and a functioning brain?

Hmmm...

*Context of my tweet: