The Dystopian Strangeness of being suspended on Twitter

I abhor these kinds of things, at this point pretty much on principle. I don't want to be one of those people that brags about not having social media, but I came to a point in 2014 where I realized they were not worth the effort and deleted Facebook and Twitter and maybe one or two others. It was a good thing.

I 'successfully' had a twitter account for maybe six months in 2013. I followed a few writers, a lot of dumb weird twitter accounts (is weird twitter still a thing?) and had the pinnacle of my social media fame when I just tweeted something like 'My favorite radical feminist is Andrea Twerkin' and got four likes.

At this point twitter feels almost like an anachronism. Like something that should be in the history books as having lived its life and now out to pasture. But there are a lot of interesting writers who post updates exclusively on twitter so, a few months back, I semi-grudgingly attempted to create a new twitter account, for the express purpose of following writers and journals that I found.

The process, of course, was very easy. I got on and went on a bit of a spree, following these folks that seemed interested. Shortly afterwards I was asked for me phone number, to validate my identity. Sure, fine, I put it in, but since I was in the middle of rural Utah I didn't have any service and couldn't respond to the verification code.

Twitter, being near the very bottom of my life priorities, was forgotten for a few weeks until I had phone service to verify the code. When I opened the page there was a notification that my account was suspended. If I remember correctly, it didn't actually tell me until I tried to follow someone, at which point the little banner popped up in the bottom of the screen. Again, low priorities, I forgot about it and figured it would resolve itself.

Yesterday I tried it again, filed an appeal, explained the situation which, I figured, was common and innocent enough that it would be sorted out without issue. How naive. I was informed, shortly after, in a terse and stern e-mail that my account had repeat violations of Twitter's policies (I had not sent out a single tweet) and that I should not attempt another appeal or seek further information.

So I am locked in this strange place, where I can see my account, click around on the page but am unable to send out, or receive any information (all the account that I followed have been unfollowed). I even attempted to deactivate the account, just, you know, sadly place my tail between my legs and limp out the back door. But the beautiful thing is, when I went to deactivate the account I was told that this is not allowed, because my account is suspended.

This, I feel, is where the absurd arrives. Unable to actually do anything, even the one benign thing I had hoped to do: learn about what other writers were up to, I am forced to wallow in shame at some sort of altercation. I'm not indignant. Life will go swiftly on without Twitter. It is just a strange place to be, turned away and locked out for no apparent reason, and unable to discover why.