silverscape - Tumblr blog

[silverscape]

Hi

This blog exists because an anonymous employee at Twitter has gone absolutely insane. After I was forced to be away from my computer for a while, because I was moving and had stuff in storage, I tried to log back into my account. This one.

Something that should sound familiar to Twitter users by this point then happened: the system detected my login as “unusual activity” and locked me out of my account, doing something that it really shouldn’t be doing. As you can see by following the link above, there was nothing even remotely offensive on that locked account. I’ve been posting minimalist black and white photos of water, with no people in them. This might very well have been the most G-rated account in the history of Twitter.

Of course, I appealed. I heard back from an employee of Twitter, an anonymous one (as always) who turned down my appeal on the basis that I had broken the rules at Twitter. I asked him which rules I had broken. He refused to answer the question. Months later, my account remains locked.

Why would the slimebag on the staff act like this? In my own case, I can probably answer the question. A few years ago, when I was still a practicing Jew, a number of the literal neo-Nazis on Twitter and a few other social networking sites found out about my tribal status, and I got dogpiled - slurs, roughly weekly death threats ... the usual treatment anti-Semites dish out to us, when they feel empowered. But Twitter did something very different to me, as it did to a number of Jewish users, doing this sort of thing often enough as to gain a certain notoriety - it first locked and then suspended my main, personal account while leaving the Nazis free to go on posting abuse without interruption. They persisted in taking this position until I threatened them with a lawsuit, and then they backed down for a while. But they went on looking for excuse to go on doing what they did, before.

In the case of the account we’re talking about, here, the one I was using to represent the photographers on the Silverscapes group on Flickr, having gotten stonewalled by the conveniently anonymous employee in question, while I suppose I could do as I said I would and get the family lawyers involved, the potential reward hardly justifies the effort and expense. I only had two followers and maybe a few dozen tweets. The Silverscapes group had some nice content, but it never really got very active.

That being the case, what would I really be fighting for? The freedom to make Jack Dorsey a little richer? No, if I’m going to be starting almost fresh as I start sharing my own work, the old group having gone fairly dormant, there’s no reason for me to do so on a site that has routinely treated me like dirt. Forget that. I’ll be doing my update notices here on Tumblr, and will invite that mighty base of two followers to come over here. I’ll probably do something similar with my far more active main personal account, too.

At one point, Google was turning up over 30 million hits in a search under anti-Semitism and Twitter, even before Jack himself is said to have posted some fairly Nazi-ish stuff, and then tried to claim that the hackers made him do it. Think about it - 30 million. There are less than 15 million Jews on the entire planet. Can you imagine how exhausting dealing with that got, at a time when Support was on the side of the trolls and the bigots?

I owe myself better than an experience like that. Who doesn’t?