My complicated 15-year relationship with Twitter
...and a proposal to create a Bill of Rights for Twitter 2.0 (Part No. 1)
This is the first installment of my thoughts on what a Twitter 2.0 Bill of Rights might include. I’ve started the series with some background of my experience joining and being suspended from Twitter over the past +15 years. If you’re not interested in the backstory and want to get to the meat of Part No. 1 of the series, scroll down by clicking here: ‘SUSPENSIONS’.
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BACKGROUND
A lifetime ago in the summer of 2005, I met with a startup called Odeo about a partnership with my fledgling social podcasting business - Fancast. I even attended the launch party for the company’s public introduction of its podcast directory at the House of Shields in June of that year.
Just a few hours before the launch party, in what seemed like a HUGE setback, Apple announced that iTunes would begin supporting podcasts - basically driving a stake through the heart of Odeo’s original business plan.1 Undeterred, Ev Williams, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass pivoted Odeo into what we now know as Twitter.
When Twitter first launched at SXSW all of my startup friends were using it sharing details about their lives - where they ate, pooped, and slept. It seemed so banal. But after hearing Ev talk about how Twitter would become the world’s ‘public square’ I decided to open an account. The deal was simple. I would bring my content, creating a virtuous network effect and attracting new users to Twitter who would bring their own content and friends to the platform, and in return, Twitter would provide us all access to the free speech platform at no cost. Based on that contract I created my account in April 2007.
For thirteen years I dutifully tweeted, retweeted, and liked without incident. I was approached by several competitors including Jaiku, Plazes, Kyte, Yappd, and Pownce about moving my time and attention to their platforms instead but I was loyal to Twitter.
For many years I had been identified as part of a group known as the Top Conservatives on Twitter. The list was organized by a conservative grassroots organizer and author named Michael Leahy and given the #TCOT hashtag by a 78-year-old grandmother named Beulah Garret (now deceased). Shortly after Rick Santelli’s rant, we began organizing events around the country and the so-called ‘tea party’ was born.2
As a result, for almost a decade Twitter was dominated by conservatives and libertarians - that dominance mysteriously began to disappear shortly after President Trump was elected in 2016 - by 2020 almost everyone associated with the #TCOT hashtag had been silenced.
On March 3rd, 2021 without explanation or notice I was ‘permanently suspended’ from Twitter. I had never received a warning. I had never knowingly violated the rules. I just woke up one Wednesday morning and when I tried to log into my account I received a simple message that I had been permanently suspended for violating Twitter’s rules. I tried unsuccessfully to reach out to a few contacts I had inside the company.
I filed an appeal and received an email confirming they were reviewing it and would contact me with their decision. Weeks and months passed without a response. I filed a few more appeals and received confirmation Twitter received them but I never received any other response. Twitter was a black hole. Shortly after Elon Musk announced he was buying Twitter I decided to try once again to get my account reinstated. To that end, I reached out to Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy, Lauren Culbertson Grieco. We both were from Georgia and worked for GOP members of congress so I figured she might be sympathetic to my cause. Her name may sound familiar as we recently learned from the Twitter Files released by Elon Musk and reported on by Matt Taibbi that Lauren was involved in the censorship and suppression of the New York Post and their reporting on the sale of President Biden’s influence by his family.3
Despite confirmation that Lauren received my correspondence I never heard back from her. Once the deal closed I decided to try contacting Lauren once again on October 10th but this time I did three things differently:
I mentioned that I was a paying customer (fun fact Twitter billed me for Twitter Blue even though I was permanently suspended);
I pointed out that I live in Texas where it is illegal to censor someone on social media for political reasons4;
AND copied two Harmeet Dhillon5 and Robert Barnes6 on my email (they're both well-known lawyers who Twitter is very familiar with).
Within minutes I got an email from litigation@twitter.com asking me not to contact Twitter employees (sorry, Lauren) and claiming I had never actually appealed my suspension suggesting that “If you believe we made a mistake suspending or locking your account, you can file an appeal..." FWIW I made multiple appeals and have the receipts to prove it.
Despite this, I filed yet another appeal and followed up to ensure Twitter’s litigation team got it - incredulously they couldn’t find it. Eventually, I sent them the tracking numbers for a few of my appeals and continued to check back regularly. The last time I heard from Twitter’s litigation team was on November 15th indicating they were finally looking into my suspension. Then at 8:44 PM on November 22, 20222 (two days before Thanksgiving) without warning, notice, or explanation my account was restored.
So I’m back along with hundreds of thousands of other conservatives. That is the good news. The bad news is that the opaque and byzantine rules that governed the use of Twitter before Elon Musk’s takeover are even more convoluted than before. On one hand, Musk promised that Twitter would only censor/suspend content/users that violated the law but on the other, he suspended Kanye West for posting perfectly legal albeit abhorrent content. Is Twitter going to be a free speech platform or is it going to be an altruistically moderated platform?
When Ev Williams pitched Twitter at SXSW years ago we entered into a contract - a contract that Twitter unilaterally broke shortly after the 2016 election. For me, the years of effort I had made to bring thousands of users to the platform disappeared without notice or explanation on March 3rd, 2021.
If we’re going to come back to Twitter 2.0 we need a new contract - we need a Bill of Rights. Here are some of my ideas:
TWITTER 2.0 BILL OF RIGHTS
Over the coming days and weeks, I’ll be sharing my ideas for things that ought to be included in Twitter 2.0’s Bill of Rights. Today I’ll share my thoughts on suspensions:
SUSPENSIONS
To start, the phrase ‘permanent suspension’ is horrifically Orwellian - it should be removed from Twitter’s vocabulary and replaced with something like ‘suspended indefinitely’. With that out of the way, I thought it might be important to share the impact of being suspended from Twitter.
When you are suspended from Twitter the company with the fourth most popular website on the internet shares a page on their website with the world announcing your infraction similar to this:
In the conservative community being suspended from Twitter after 2020 was a badge of honor but in the wider world it was a signal that you might be a racist insurrectionist too dangerous to participate in polite society. When I was suspended, the first or second result for my name was my Twitter profile page - anyone who Googled my name saw that the 4th most popular website on the internet had seen fit to suspend me for violating their rules (I still don’t know what rules I violated).
Think about it. The first thing current and prospective investors and customers would learn about me was that I wasn’t allowed to participate on Twitter. Over the past two years, I’ve had to explain why I was suspended by Twitter (something I don’t even know) over and over. How many potential employers have Googled me only to see I have been banned from the world’s public square? What about prospective Tinder & Bumble matches? The true cost of Twitter’s decision to deplatform me will never be known but I am certain I paid a heavy price.
If someone is suspended for a definite or indefinite period they should have certain rights:
Users should be told exactly why they are being suspended and if and how they might cure the suspension - i.e. a fair appeal process. Realizing that adjudicating appeals can be time-consuming Twitter should offer an expedited appeal for a fee (perhaps $250);
Users should also be informed if another party - government, corporation, or individual(s) requested their content and/or account be censored or suspended;
Requests by government officials/representatives to censor content or suspend accounts should be publicly available by default;
Users should be given the power to notify their followers (DM) that they have been suspended and how they might reach them in the future (email, phone, URL, etc);
Users should be given control over how their profile page appears (if at all) by allowing them to include forwarding information;
Users should be allowed to export the names and contact information of those they follow and those who follow them (assuming they have opted into the feature);
Finally, suspended users should STILL be able to follow and unfollow users - perhaps the worst impact of my suspension was not being able to use Twitter as my newsreader - I spent years curating the list of users I followed.
Stay Tuned for Twitter 2.0 Bill of Rights • Part No. 2