Tag: blocking on Twitter

How I Ended up in Twitter Jail

~ Mi Blog es tu Blog ~ 2 Comments
YOU are not crying. I am crying…

Ok I didn’t see *this* coming.

On the morning of Dec. 15, as I opened up my email account, I saw a message from Twitter with the following Subject: Your Twitter account has been locked.

My first reaction was –of course– W T F? ¿Qué chingaos hice? and started going through several possible scenarios.

Was it because of my multiple tweets mocking President Trump for having retweeting me once? Or perhaps, someone really important at the New York Times finally blew the whistle on my ongoing critique of their peas-in-guacamole recipe? (Let alone my Twitter bio.) Or…was it a collective denunciation by all those people whom I asked to DELETE THEIR ACCOUNT for not knowing how to eat tamales or make enchiladas?

Well, it was none of that.

What it was, according to Twitter, was punishment for having violated the Twitter Rules, specifically for “Violating our rules against promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm.”

Self harm? Me? Tweeting about… self harm? Promoting or encouraging suicide? Perhaps, I thought, they misread something I tweeted about ham, not harm. But then I kept scrolling to find the offending tweet, which was not even an original tweet but a response to someone else’s retweet.

Here’s what happened.

On December 13, Montana legislator and former congressional candidate Tom Winter, tweeted his outrage about a piece of news that made a lot of people very angry (me included.)

I do not follow Winter on Twitter, but my buddy @dcbigjohn does, and this is why I saw the tweet to begin with. My response was brief and as you can see below, it was SUPPOSED TO BE IRONIC.

I guess the Twitter algorithm (assuming it was an algorithm and not a bunch of weird MAGA bots) doesn’t understand irony and doesn’t understand that in all the years I’ve spent on Twitter I have never (not once) promoted or encouraged self-harm. Heck, I’ve even been warning people about avocado hand like forever!

I guess I will remain in Twitter jail until Twitter decides to read up and weigh my appeal. In the meantime, the president of the United States continues to tweet unsubstantiated allegations of fraud and tons of misleading information to millions of people, while my beloved followers will have to live without my very important posts (VIPs) about tacos, tamales, enchiladas and other extremely important virus-related musings.

On the bright side, it has been moving to know there is a massive movement to bring me back: Thank you Le Chanclé for start stirring the pot, and to all of my friends showing concern.

I’m totally fine, so fine I’ll even starting happy hour earlier than usual. I hope to see y’all soon on Twitter.

In the meantime…