Twitter suspensions and their aftermath

Every so often my Twitter suspension comes up on social media, with various detractors of mine voicing different theories about why I was suspended from Twitter. 

FC/RPM/S2C proponents seem to think I was suspended for “bullying” remarks and/or “violent threats” against autistic individuals and/or autistic advocates. Crazy as this sounds, I have screenshots that show FC/RPM/S2C proponents actually saying this. (In the interest of basic decency, however, I'm keeping those screenshots private).

Structured Word Inquiry proponents prefer to think I was suspended because I called SWI a “cult” run by a shadowy and now deceased man in France with no formal linguistic credentials--a characterization of the man in question that, ironically, the person who first made this claim against me now agrees with. (I have screenshots to prove this as well but, again in the interest of basic decency, I'll likewise keep those private).

Progressive math proponents may think I was suspended for harassing them and finding fault with “social justice math.” (Who knows? It's not always so easy to see what people say beyond your back.)

And so on...

As for Twitter itself (this may have changed on X), once it suspends an account, it feeds such sundry impressions by one’s sundry detractors with canned messages about the account’s suspension that are automatically sent to anyone who “reported” the account for any reason.  People, naturally, report Twitter accounts for all sorts of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with Twitter’s rules. Some people, for example, prefer to eliminate their critics rather than debate them.

Unless you’re sufficiently famous, however (e.g., the past and present President of the U.S.), Twitter’s/X's suspension decisions aren’t made by human beings mulling over tweets, but by AI bots programmed to look for certain key words and phrases (“kill”, “smash”, “vaccine injury”). That’s because human moderation is costly, and because the number of human moderators needed to review every possibly bullying/threatening/ dangerously misinformative tweet is astronomical. Key word-based moderation, of course, is about as linguistically crude as it gets, and the result is that many suspensions are senseless. 

Twitter tattlers, of course, prefer to think that Twitter suspended their opponents for good reasons–i.e., because they reported them for bad behavior. But there aren’t enough people on Twitter’s staff for human review of more than a tiny fraction of what’s reported. And if Twitter’s bots were to automatically suspend everyone who gets reported by someone else, Twitter would eventually amount to little more than cat videos. 

None of these considerations–assuming they even occur to them–stop certain Twitter tattlers and their allies from proclaiming, without evidence, that their detractors have made bullying or threatening remarks on Twitter or elsewhere. And though one might challenge them, as I have, to find a single bullying or threatening remark in anything one has ever written anywhere, the sort of people who prefer to resolve disagreements by tattling, blocking, and suspending may not be the sort of people who think that accusations (or autism interventions, or reading instruction, or math curricula) should be supported with actual evidence.

As for my particular situation, I've known for several years now that my suspension was triggered by more than just certain key words. There was an actual human being involved (I have screenshots of that, too--it's quite the smoking gun). But because this person is near and dear to me, I have made a promise to that person not to disclose that person's actions publicly. The person in question, meanwhile, has expressed remorse for their actions (which also include twice deleting all the blog posts on this site) and has been making it up to me ever since.