Farewell to Twitter/X. Unless something drastic changes, the only thing I intend to post there is notifications to my updates here. I will still follow accounts for news, but I doubt I will interact because I am almost invisible on the platform. I am deboosted into oblivion.
Why the hissy fit? It’s partly my own doing and partly the fault of the Gender Borg. When I first started posting on Twitter in my own name, I made a beginner’s error, and that mistake has cost me. The Musk purchase, the need to generate lost advertising revenue, and now the new EU Digital Services Act have, I believe, combined to unperson me forever on the platform.
A brief history. I first joined Twitter under an anonymous account in June 2010. I used it a little for about a week but decided Twitter was of no interest to me and never used it again for over a decade. I rejoined with a new account in my own name in October 2021, ostensibly because of the treatment that my former (distant) colleague Kathleen Stock was getting from her University and also because I was both appalled and perplexed that members of the academic philosophy community had penned a letter attacking her OBE award. I was until 2006 an academic philosopher, and I wanted to offer my support and, perhaps, debate the issue with members of said community.
This was my original sin. Like a bull in a china shop, my first posts on Twitter were in support of Kathleen and after three, my account was suspended due to “suspicious activity on your account”. I was asked to prove my identity, which I did, and the block was lifted. However, I was now flagged by the ancien régime, and whatever I did, I could not grow my account. Despite tweeting regularly for the best part of a year, ~50% on matters Terfy, and much of the rest on party politics, my account grew to the grand total of 21 followers.
I am a follower of various high-profile accounts who are persona non grata (aka ‘notorious transphobes’ according to the TRAs), such as Kathleen, Maya Forstater, Helen Joyce, Sharron Davies, Graham Linehan, Andrew Doyle, Dennis Kavanagh, Malcolm Clark, James Dreyfus, Kelly Jane Keen and Aja the Empress. I retweet and post replies on their accounts occasionally. This earned me a place on the Terf blocklists (alongside Elon Musk, of course). I view these people with enormous respect, people who have sacrificed a great deal to fight for free speech, biological reality, and women’s and LGB rights against a rising tide of misogyny, homophobia and the sexualisation of minors.
I would add that unless my memory fails me, I have never knowingly misgendered an individual on Twitter, nor have I ever targetted a trans-identifying individual with comments on their posts, nor have I shared any content that mocks a trans-identifying individual. I really don’t care if somebody identifies as trans; what I object to is the medicalisation and potential sterilisation of children, intact males in women’s sports and spaces, and compelled speech. I do not have skin in the game in that I am neither a woman nor gay, but I can see clearly that their rights are being trampled over, and I believe that free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democratic society.
In the autumn of 2022, I became, for want of a better phrase, ‘red-pilled’. I had largely parked my concerns about the pandemic narrative whilst caring for my dying partner, but after her death, I began to investigate the claims regarding a lab leak and lockdown and vaccine harms. I also started to think in more depth about gender ideology and how it had gained such a stranglehold on our society and our education system so rapidly. Court cases were proceeding, and I couldn’t understand why something that my philosophical training, scientific knowledge, and simple common sense told me was nonsense wasn’t rapidly disappearing into the dustbin of the history of terrible ideas.
I began to develop the conspiracy-minded thought that it wasn’t going away because it was being relentlessly pushed by the ‘elites’. I read online that it might in some way be connected to the WEF’s transhumanism agenda (which I am actually not at all convinced about on further reading), but that, alongside my Covid concerns, led me off down the rabbit hole where I find myself a year later, a firm believer that we are descending into global totalitarianism. That is all too much to go into here; suffice it to say, for now, gender ideology was very much connected to my red-pilling.
At the end of the year, Musk reopened Twitter. A flood of Covid critical medics and scientists and those critical of the Net Zero agenda were let back in, alongside many gender-critical voices. Twitter has provided rich pickings for debate and information ever since.
My own activity on Twitter changed. My gender-critical activity declined to about a quarter of my posts, with most of the rest now concerning matters of free speech, censorship, Covid, and technocratic authoritarianism. Despite my deboosted replies, I managed to grow my follower account to the giddy heights of 142 over the next year.
I became concerned about my growing awareness that my posts were only reaching a fraction of my followers and that my replies to the posts of others were still rarely read. Occasionally, somebody would see them, retweet them, and that would garner a response with tens or hundreds, even on a rare occasion, thousands of likes. Little dopamine hits.
I had read up on deboosting and learnt that the best thing to do was tweet ‘nicely’ on innocuous topics for a while. I tried that, but it didn’t work. I also read that giving Twitter a break altogether would often fix it. I moved house over the summer and was too busy for Twitter for about ten weeks. When I returned a month ago, I began tweeting quite actively, but I was disappointed to find that I was still deboosted. I began to wonder if my online behaviour was contributing.
I have been blocked by a few high-profile accounts, who are well known for serial blocking, for the crime of attempting to engage them in debate. These are James O’Brien, Owen Jones, Jolyon Maugham, Christopher Snowdon and George Monbiot. It’s a pity because, except for Maugham and Snowdon, I own, have read, and largely enjoyed, the books of the other three and will likely buy and read anything they publish in the future.
I don’t believe I have behaved badly towards them. I may have irritated Monbiot by engaging in a couple of long debates with his followers on his thread. I once misattributed a view to him, for which I apologised, and he accepted. Still, with the others, this was not the case. My memory is that I merely challenged them on their statements a couple of times each and got blocked.
As a former philosopher, I consider ad hominem attacks the lowest form of argumentation. Regarding modern social media discussions, I treat adjacency-based arguments and whataboutism with similar contempt. I can’t claim I have never used them, but instances have been few and far between. I always try to play the ball, not the man.
My behaviour on Twitter has then, admittedly by my own estimation, never been abusive or personal (though I admit that I have jokingly referred to the ‘fox clubber’ on a couple of occasions). My blocks from these high-profile accounts no doubt contribute to my algorithmic scoring, but on analysis, I came to believe that they are not a significant reason for my deboosting because that began on the platform almost from day one.
I came back to believing that it was almost entirely down to the Terf blocklists. Back in February, Musk complained about blocklists. I was given to understand (perhaps erroneously) that the Twitter algorithm uses the number of blocks against an account to assess its toxicity and that bad actors manipulated this for denial of service attacks. This may change soon if Musk goes through with his threat to remove blocking altogether.
Yesterday, I wrote to Twitter support to lay out my case and asked for my deboosting to be rescinded. I received the following reply:
Thanks for reaching out.
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This flannel translates to ‘No, we will not remove your deboosting’.
What was I hoping for? Well, something along the lines of ‘Yes, we are aware of the blocklist problem and will shortly resolve it by removing the blocking feature. Please open another ticket if you are still having problems subsequently’.
Perhaps, before flouncing off, I should have waited to see whether my problem would be resolved if/when blocking is removed and viewed this response as Twitter Support not being able to state the truth at the current time. Perhaps that is what will happen.
However, I don’t have any hope whatsoever that it will. There are two reasons for this. The first is CEO Linda Yaccarino’s statements on ‘lawful but awful’ in a Twitter Space a couple of weeks ago. This is very much the ‘freedom of speech but not freedom of reach’ concept. This may or may not have anything to do with my view that we are descending into totalitarianism, especially given her past WEF roles. I instead think, though, that this is about advertising. My Twitter posts are not posts that her advertisers will want to be seen anywhere near. In fact, they are the antithesis of the same. I am of little value as a product to the company, even with a subscription.
The second reason is the EU Digital Services Act (and, one day, the UK Online Safety Act). My posts are precisely the sort of posts that will unfortunately be classed as ‘hate speech’ or ‘misinformation’. So will those of many of the people I follow, I suspect. The ancien régime will live again. Few will be de-platformed, but those deemed deplorable will be increasingly kettled into their echo chambers, with little reach outside them. I would perhaps have stayed to participate in those echo chambers, but I am largely invisible within them, too, especially the non-Terfy ones.
21st-century totalitarianism will not be the jackboot on the face but exclusion and invisibility. My voice has been almost entirely unheard for the last two years, and I am convinced that is how it will remain on Twitter/X. I am not so arrogant to assume that it deserves to be heard; it’s just that it has sometimes had a gratifying response when it has occasionally been retweeted.
My mistake was to go all in on Terfdom when I first posted—mea culpa. I should have built more of a following first, published a book, attended demonstrations or meetings and/or had more real-world connections with like-minded people, to begin with. That would have made it far easier to make connections. The TRAs won this little battle.
Onwards and upwards. Rather than wasting my time there, I will focus on this platform now. Life is too short. I was initially put off Twitter in 2010 because of the size of tweets; long-form writing always suited me better. Substack has another year before the Digital Services Act hammer falls on it, too, and it will fall even harder here, I fear. This place is full of ‘subversives’ and ‘dissidents’, aka ‘independent journalists’, evidencing inconvenient facts.