Once again — and this time with some expectation — I find myself banned from Twitter by virtue of an algorithm that protects, whether by willful intent or by incandescent stupidity, all manner of slander and brutality while policing only deserved insult. On this, perhaps my final go-round with the platform, the offense is as intended: I have, in my very critique of the Twitter rules, insulted its CEO, Jack Dorsey. I told him, in slightly more creative language, to drop dead. Yes. I told him to take a long walk off a short pier, or grow like an onion with his head in the ground, or go jump out of a plane without a parachute. But in my particular case, I used the Yiddishkeit of my grandfather. I told him to die of boils.

That’s it. That’s what I did.

And I will confess I find it harder and harder to believe that Mr. Dorsey or the others engaged in regulating speech on his horror-show of a platform are unaware that their detached and dystopic vision of what is responsible speech and what is in fact crippling to our republic is not a solution. Having given us Twitter, they are in this moment, ruinous to its best purposes. They are ignoring the abuses of truth and the willful spread of disinformation by prevaricating trolls and anonymous bots and instead planting their flag against mere insult.

It is a rigged game. And a dishonorable one.

As employed, the Twitter algorithms result in the most vile, rancid and fraudulent provocations and claims — “You’re a Jew. Go back to Israel or find an oven,” “Women at the border are criminals and their children should be confiscated,” “Anthony Bourdain was murdered by the Deep State,” “Trump never called journalists enemies of the American people” — being granted a de facto equivalence with the responsible attempts to combat disinformation or outright racism or misogyny. What results is the standardized 1935 dynamic in which the most untethered fascist claims or affronts — the Big Lies, as Goebbels dubbed them — can exist on the same footing as the reply. (“No, it is false and unfair to say that Jews are parasites who drink the blood of Christian babies…”)

When the worst of what is allowed to live on Twitter can only be parried with contradiction or denial — with self-defeating threads of thoughtful, dry evidence — then it grants, to very real effect, the worst trash a premised credibility. No, the proper response is to call this shit by its true name, and the purveyors of such by their true names, and then block their accounts — neither allowing slanders and lies to stand unmolested, nor granting them the validity of serious debate. In doing so consistently, we might all work as pathfinders through the social media minefield, marking every hazard for the rest of the platoon.

But for its part, Twitter finds too much profit in the slander — almost all of it by anonymous posters. It stands ready to manicure the decorum only on its platform, while employing standards that allow all manner of fraudulent content to remain intact. At this late point, it is hard not to argue that the rhetorical framework of the entire platform — as disastrous as it is — is by design. This seems to be what you shitmuzzles want.

The supposedly offensive remark that ends me is highlighted in bold below. Hilariously, it is embedded in the original thread of complaint I posted to Twitter upon my return from their gulag a couple weeks ago. For the obvious reason that it constitutes neither harassment nor a threat, and is not even a credible example of someone seriously hoping actual harm on anyone, I’m not going to delete the tweet as demanded. The rhetoric is justified entirely. And so, I can assume, this decision ends my time on Twitter:

1) @jack @twitter, @TwitterSupport: Still waiting for a cogent explanation of why the common rhetoric of telling assholes to drop dead is prohibited on your shithole platform. But allowing said assholes to slander women who have had children kidnapped is fine by you…

2) Still waiting, @jack, for an explanation of how telling assholes who slander 14-year-old Holocaust survivors they should drop dead is impermissible, but the slander is allowed to repeat itself for months on end on Twitter.

3) Still waiting, you fuckmooks, for a human intellect to engage me directly and forthrightly about the fact that I was obliged to remove posts that I can in every way defend in order to even register a complaint or appeal of a suspension.

4) Still waiting for you to either restore those posts or provide any response to your conduct, which includes barring me from commenting on the death of friend, while some shit-troll remains on Twitter unmolested, declaring – unevidenced – that the death was a political murder.

5) I’ve given you two patient weeks, @jack, to engage in any coherent, honorable and intellectually honest way with the substance of my appeal of a 01110011101-brained conceptualization of rhetoric that honors slander and falsehood but cannot somehow abide mere insult. Nothing.

6) The fact is, your algorithms and your ethos here are just fecal. And when the history of this awful American epoch is written, the tone-deaf abdication of fundamental ethics by social media platforms will be an overlay to the disaster. You are failing us all miserably.

7) And what is evident, @jack, is that while the giants of our digital revolution are masters of the universe when it comes to the technical challenges of the information age, they are — by and large — moral midgets when it comes to the ethics and responsibilities of speech.

8) And, oh yeah, no need to hide behind your horseshit cowardice that privacy concerns prevent you from discussing or defending in detail Twitter’s actions with regard to this extant overreach by your algorithmic submoronity. I hereby relinquish any expectation of said privacy…

9) I’d be delighted to debate and discuss this abject failure by Twitter openly with any representative of this soulless platform provided an actual human can be engaged. But I have no expectations, @jack. The remote gutlessness of this one-sided dynamic is no bug, but a feature.

10) So, die of boils, @jack. Yup. There it is. The sum total of my crime against Twitter. I’ve told you to drop dead, as I told libelers and liars to drop dead. You can say that constitutes a threat, but that would be empty and embarrassing. I hold no dominion over life & death.

11) Just as I lack possession of any biological agent that could cause a venereal rash to settle in the throat of a lying fuckmook who is saying that a woman who has had her child kidnapped is a criminal who deserves that fate. These are not threats, you gutless wonder…

12)…they are insults. As I am insulting you now for providing a continued platform for trolls and bots who peddle this shit, or the notion that teenaged Holocaust survivors can be libeled, or that my friend Tony Bourdain was murdered to advance the politics of the alt-right…

13) I have not encouraged anyone to violence, or doxxed anyone, or suggested any act of human intervention against anyone. Nor can you claim that I have harassed a single troll or bot; I fire one and block the motherfuckers. Hardly the stuff of harassment, @jack.

14) Yet, this is where you draw the line? Really? @jack, @twitter, @twittersupport. Please reinstate my removed tweets. And if that is too much for you beshitted hypocrites, then shut down my account and run screaming into the night because, well, dead you mooks oughta drop.

15) But let the record show, I waited a full two weeks after my suspension, and a week after my reinstatement, to give you hollow fuckstumbles a chance to engage fairly with the appeal that I forwarded to you as directed. Nothing. Nada. Not a word back. Fuck all y’all.

To conclude, I never received a single reply either online or to the provided telephone number from anyone at Twitter. This is all just useless yelling into Jack Dorsey’s shallow money trench where, to paraphrase Hunter Thompson, good men die like dogs while slanderers, liars and bots run free.

It’s been fun, you scrotes.

Peace,

David Simon