My psycho drama with Twitter continues as I have now been banned from the platform. I think it is a temporary thing, but it is a bit hard to say as the appeal button doesn’t work.
So what happened? I am a regular commenter on controversial political matters and I often express myself bluntly. My favourite way of indicating that I disagree with extremist views is to say ‘you’re an idiot’. I usually use this against people of the far right. I disagree with people on the far left as well. But they are usually just wrong. They don’t tend to be wrong in an idiotic way.
So getting banned for being offensive was always something I thought possible. The idiots that I called idiots were always quite likely to report me. That’s the idiotic sort of thing that idiots do. So if there is some sort of tally of complaints being kept I was in line to breach the allowance.
But it turned out that I got banned not for a political tweet, but for the other thing I like doing on Twitter which is puns. I am aware that this is the sort of thing that makes you even more unpopular than political opinions. What happened was somebody tweeted about how much they disliked pedants. They said that they always blocked them. I agreed that pedants should be blocked. And I added that pendants should be hung.
It wasn’t a very good pun, but like a lot of tweets it seemed like a good idea for the short length of time it took to post. It might have been very slightly funnier if I’d done it the other way around and said that pendants should be hanged. Either way it was a play on the common grammatical error made by people who don’t remember that hanging a person has a different past participle to hanging an object. So it wasn’t in any way a call for violence against anyone in particular – though I concede it might be a bad enough pun to make someone want to punch me.
Nonetheless Twitter informed me that their platform doesn’t allow such inflammatory language. It indicated that it was a temporary ban but didn’t let me know how long I have been expelled for. So now I am really going to have to find out what life is like without Twitter with no chance of any backsliding.