Free From The Bluebird & Could You Write Your Manifesto In 280 Characters?

Update from the Twitter suspension, the ban hammer has been lifted! I got this response from Twitter via email:

Hello, Your account is now unlocked, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience. Twitter has automated systems that find and remove automated spam accounts and it looks like your account got caught up in one of these spam groups by mistake. This sometimes happens when an account exhibits automated behavior in violation of the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules). Again, we apologize for the inconvenience. Please do not respond to this email as replies will not be monitored. Thanks, Twitter Support

So lets take at the rules provided via the link, I’ll show you the rules that I interpret as relevant to my account’s case:

Spam and Security Access or search, or attempt to access or search, Twitter by any means (automated or otherwise) other than through our currently available, published interfaces that are provided by Twitter (and only pursuant to the applicable terms and conditions), unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Twitter. Note that crawling Twitter is permissible if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file; however, scraping Twitter without our prior consent is expressly prohibited. Spam: You may not use Twitter’s services for the purpose of spamming anyone. Spam is generally defined on Twitter as bulk or aggressive activity that attempts to manipulate or disrupt Twitter or the experience of users on Twitter to drive traffic or attention to unrelated accounts, products, services, or initiatives. Some of the factors that we take into account when determining what conduct is considered to be spamming include: if you post duplicative or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account, or create duplicate or substantially similar accounts; if you send large numbers of unsolicited replies or mentions;



What rules did I break?

Ok so lets go through them one by one, first off we have this rule:

Under the Twitter rules an account is considered spam if it uses Twitter services via an unapproved program, app or client.

Access […] Twitter by any means […] other than through our currently available, published interfaces that are provided by Twitter.

Meaning you may only use Twitter using the Twitter app or web page, interestingly I exclusively use the Twitter web client, if you see my posts you’ll find the majority were posted via “Twitter Web App”.

More precisely I use Twitter with ‘SlimSocial for Twitter’, Slim social its just a wrapper around Twitter’s mobile website and APIs. I use this app because it protects the users privacy because it acts as a middle man between the twitter website and my phone, preventing the Twitter web client from gathering data from my phone.

I suspect SlimSocial’s shielding is being perceived by Twitter’s algorithm as some kind of web scraping or as a unintended Twitter client, when in fact its just the official web client + tracker blocking.

The rules also stipulate that spam accounts also talk about the same topics and reply with multiple posts:

[Spaming consists of … ] if you post duplicative or substantially similar content [and] if you send large numbers of unsolicited replies or mentions.

Similar content and large replies seem like the epidemy of spam, but we musn’t forget that a key point of spam is consent, what makes spam annoying isn’t that you get tons of replies about one particular topic, spam is annoying when you get tons of replies about an irrelevant topic, un-wanted content is almost exclusively off topic: It’s the context that matters.

The naturally emerging rewards and punishments.

Building an algorithm that understands context is a task not up to social media to solve - at least not primarily - The main task of social media is accelerating and facilitating user interaction, in my view an utopic social media site facilitates back and forth discussion and communication, we need easy, secure and private communication for our everyday lives, a chat with your friend, groupchat with coworkers - that kind of peer to peer meetings or value exchanges are important for keeping our day to day moving - But for society to advance, for the next Renaissance to occur we need long term discussions, we need the modern day equivalent to the 17th century coffeehouses, a place for thoughtful debate and expression.

Just like a Burger King would look out of place besides The Museum of Modern Art, there’s a sort of clash between long term intellectual intercourse and sending memes to your pals. Given the nature of some topics you may appreciate a long paragraph or two, using repetition to make a concept click in and even - God forbid - more than 280 characters! I know it sounds crazy to try to express yourself outside of quips and hot takes, but hey I might be completely out of my mind on that one.

In my particular case, I created the _digitalrights account to share a message and engage in discussions and to achieve this type of communication I have successfully filled in the requirements for spam: I redact my replies on multiple posts that contain similar content, precisely because they are continuations of the same topic at hand.

Some people may argue that the Twitter rules although vague in principle, don’t target long form conversation, it was just a mistake, a perfect alignment of the stars interpreted incorrectly, the Twitter spam rules share the same concept of spam as I do, they just phrase it differently - And that’s why the rules never mention a spam account or post as being ‘off topic’ or even attempt to define or share their internal definition of spam - Well that counter argument is something I can not refute, since it claims to know the original intentions of Twitter as some kind of perfect divine book interpretation, this argument seems to me like a variation of the not true Scotsman fallacy so I will pay attention to it no more unless proven I vastly misunderstand the link they provided on their email response.

What does concern me is this: If I am flagged as spam for publicly stating my opinions and viewpoints in a repetitive enough fashion, then why are politicians allowed on Twitter? No seriously if beating around the bush with multiple posts and promoting the same ideas over and over again is indistinguishable from spam to an algorithm then politicians should have a peaty hard time on the site don’t you think?

Now enter the slippery slope for all kinds of public figures, companies, advertisers & activists - Or in other words long form communication - Think of the many speeches and documents that changed the world in the past, Luther King JR’s ‘I have a dream’ speech , The Communist Manifesto and the Ninety-five Theses come to mind, just think of the impact on society: Civil Rights, the cold war & the Protestant Reformation! These long term documents sparked our world with all it’s imperfections and quirks mind you, but this documents are transcendental and huge tidal waves still ripple today.

We went from long term documents to practically all nation’s leaders feuding on Twitter. The platforms we surround ourselves everyday tend to favor the fast foods of discussions, this is a legitimate problem and limitation of the current implementation for social media, platforms may intent to push long term connection but their selling features - their gimmicks - run contrary to these ideas and values. I’m not saying every page on the net should be it’s own medium post or that short term content is inherently harmful to society, no what I’m trying to say is that we need a balance of both & heavily normalizing one over the other leads to big time problems.

Coffeehouses and social media sites try to seek something from of us, they are designed to incentivize some behaviors over others, let’s look back at ourselves and wonder if the rewards we encourage create a more desirable world, the decision to create the future should be a conscious one, let’s stand up from the audience chair, stop being passive consequences from the world and put on our designer’s hat, build new platforms and well I’m running out of characters, I’m at minus 8108 characters right now so …… I’ll see you around …. as long as I’m allowed on Twitter, bye!

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