I’ve been meaning to write about this for a couple of months: I am now persona non grata at X/Twitter. It’s kind of a shame, as my Twitter conversations were once a major source of inspiration for this blog. But honestly, I don’t miss being on Twitter much these days. What I used to get from it in the way of stimulating discussions with people I agreed with (and more often didn’t agree with) I now get to some degree on Bluesky. More about that in a bit.

Ever since Elon Musk was forced by a judge to make good on his empty threat to buy Twitter last year, it was clear to me that my time on that platform was marked as doomed. I had no intention of paying for a service that was deteriorating in value for me and millions of other long-time users by the day. But I believed I had as good as, if not a better chance to outlast Musk there. I underestimated his tolerance for being profoundly hated, and my own vulnerability to the consequences of that behavioral quirk.

My tenure at Twitter, which began in August 2008, ended in early September, not long after I “celebrated” my 15th Twitterversary. The beginning of the end was my tweet quoting a news story about Australian multi-millionaire Tim Gurner, who told an audience at a “Property Summit” in Sydney, “‘We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, to 50 percent in my view. We need to see the pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”

My response to this heartlessness: “How to get to the front of the line when the guillotines are ready.”

I didn’t think much about this comment, except I’d wished I’d expressed it more elegantly. In fact, because Twitter doesn’t allow non-paying members to edit their tweets (part of Musk’s crude blueprint to create a class society on Twitter where there formerly wasn’t one), I wasn’t able to change the awkward-sounding “when the guillotines are ready,” to something more like “come the revolution.” Let’s just say I didn’t think it was one of my better tweets.

A couple of mornings later, after a couple of days of my usual sorts of posts about animals, film and music among retweets of news stories about the UAW strike, I opened my email inbox to find a subject line telling me my X account was suspended. The form message told me a user had reported the guillotine tweet, which had violated the rule against violent speech, and they helpfully provided the rule itself: “You may not threaten, incite, glorify, or express a desire for harm or violence.”

Shades of Democratic Underground circa 2010.

I was more annoyed than shocked by this notification. I wasn’t aware that I had been threatening or inciting violence. I just thought I had made a not very good, even clichéd kind of joke, given the long history of similar jokes other lefties and I have made about the fantasy of exacting revenge from the ruling class in this age of severe inequality. Was this glorifying violence? I thought of it more as using the idea of retributive violence as a rhetorical device, to express my anger over the mass violence this privileged Australian rhetorically threatened against people who, unlike him, have to sell their labor in order to shelter and feed themselves and their families. Did my tweet actually hurt anyone? Apparently it had triggered someone on the right.

Or… I began to think, maybe Twitter was beginning to use artificial intelligence to look for language that violated its rules. Maybe “guillotine” is on the blacklist. In the old pre-Elon days, whenever I reported someone for tweeting hate speech or harassing another person (which was not very often–maybe twice in ten years), it took much longer than a day or two for a decision to be tendered. Now my tweet was being expedited? This has the ring of automation to me.

Supporting this suspicion, when I followed the suggestion in the email to file an appeal, no sooner had I left the “courtroom” on Twitter’s site than I received another form email:

Hello,

Thank you for your patience as we reviewed your appeal request for account @ChristofPierson.

Our support team has determined that a violation did take place, and therefore we will not overturn our decision.

Your account has been suspended and will not be restored due to violations of the X Rules, specifically our rules around:
Violating our rules against violent speech.

Thanks,
X

Thank me for my patience? I can do waiting five seconds in my sleep. No, there was no “review” of my appeal. None at all. In a just world, I would be able to sue X for lying about having an actual appeal process that it obviously doesn’t actually have. Fortunately for Musk, this is not a just world; I am not the only person on Bluesky who was recently defenestrated from Xitter (as the locals at Bluesky call it) for joking about punitive decapitation for enemies of working people.

If you want proof of the lack of justice in the Xitter universe, just take a look at this report on X’s influence on the Dublin riots earlier this month.

As the Associated Press reported in October, experts who study disinformation have said that X has deteriorated under Musk to the point that it’s not merely failing to detect and remove misinformation, but is favoring posts by accounts that pay for the platform’s blue-check subscription service, regardless of who’s running them.

Crucially, according to Culloty, with respect to the violence in Dublin, the core group of far-right accounts suspected of inciting the violence had previously been removed from the platform for violating the company’s safety policies, but were reinstated following Musk’s takeover of the company.

“They were able to move back to X and a lot of people who had been banned were able to come back,” she said. “It’s notable that there are more people not trying to conceal their identity [in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover.] So they now feel quite comfortable making these incendiary statements.” 

In the aftermath of the riots, other prominent figures from the right-wing of American politics have pushed a conspiratorial, anti-immigration narrative on X in an attempt to vindicate the violence in Ireland.

Is vindicating violence (or plotting it) different from glorifying (or joking about) it? In Musk’s universe, apparently it is, especially if the violence in question is against immigrants rather than billionaires.

I’m long over X, but even though I’ve found an ersatz community of Twitter refugees on Bluesky, it’s obviously not the same as what Twitter once was, which was, quite frankly, great. Musk clearly has no feel for what made Twitter unique, and sometimes central to the multiform global conversation: it was once and for many years a free (meaning gratis) platform where anyone with internet access could join in and have a chance at equality with the “blue checks” (verified accounts of news organizations, companies and well-known persons) when that term meant something more than “paying customers.”

Bluesky is free to join, but like X, it isn’t accessible to everyone. You need to be invited to join. And until recently, you had to be a member to even look at the content. The beta version of Bluesky’s visible-to-all version does not yet match the experience of users, who can see not only a skeet (Bluesky’s version of a tweet) but also all the responses to it. But at least it’s something. One of the best things about pre-Musk Twitter, before Musk stupidly put tight restrictions on the amount of views non-paying members and non-members are afforded, was the universal accessibility that made it possible for Twitter users’ posts to be viewed by anyone inside or out of Twitter. Now that the once vital social media world is being sequestered behind paywalls, its vitality and significance to the world has become a mere a memory. One of the rare worthwhile technological pleasures of this already tired and degraded twenty-first century has gone right down the Xitter.