Banished

Didn’t think I’d be writing another blog post anytime soon to be honest, but if you are one of my Twitter followers and have maybe been wondering where I’ve disappeared to (or maybe you haven’t), this is the only way I can think of to explain what happened: The week before Christmas I was permanently suspended from Twitter for the comment below.


Those of you familiar with the movie Clueless will recognize both those comments as quotes from this scene in it.

But I guess if you haven’t seen the movie or you’re a bot programmed to flag certain words and phrases it might look like I’m randomly telling someone I want to shoot them in the head. A couple of hours later I got the following email from Twitter.


So I did what they said and appealed, explaining what the context of my comment was and even including a YouTube link to the scene above. I also pointed out that Alyssa had LIKED my reply so clearly she knew what I meant and that I wasn’t being malicious or threatening in any way. Their response to my perfectly reasonable (and true!) explanation was to tell me I was suspended for good.


I have appealed again, basically making the same points and telling them if they actually looked at my account they would see that the idea I would seriously threaten to shoot someone is ridiculous. I got a boilerplate reply saying they will continue their review but nearly two weeks later I haven’t heard anything and my Twitter feed has this at the top.

So I’m assuming that’s that.

I’m probably going to start a new account once I figure out how to keep my identity secret but, to be honest, there is a little voice in my head telling me I’m better off without being on Twitter — the past couple of weeks off it have been kind of nice and I’ve got a lot of reading done.

But who am I kidding? Of course I’ll be back. It may be a hellscape of arseholes and idiots but it’s worth it for the tiny percentage that isn’t. Besides, where else am I going to flog my T-shirts?