| HN Mirror

About a year ago, there were a lot of topical submissions to HN (that I liked reading) but received community backlash, because they consisted almost entirely of posting tweets (of Trump et al) about the current political situation. The community here made an argument that I could agree with: if I wanted to read it, I should just follow them on Twitter.

So I made a Twitter account, that I checked about once every two months, that followed the relevant players. I didn't make any tweets of my own and I didn't favorite or retweet anything. Just catching up on what people have been saying worked for my interests. Twitter banned me for Harassment. I had nothing that could have possibly offended anyone - I didn't even have a bio for my profile. I'd say the system assumed I was a robot? It was frustrating to me, because in order to appeal my ban, I had to provide my phone number. I don't want to give Twitter my phone number. I get the fewest spam calls of anyone I know, and I do that by protecting my phone number. Twitter has earned no trust from me, and is not getting my phone number. I tried to delete my account, but it needed my phone number to do that. I tried to sign out of the account so I could just see tweets as a guest, but it wanted my phone number for that too. Well, I signed out by deleting browser data, but there is still a tombstone on my email address in their database.

This experience has sown distrust with me about Twitter's harassment numbers. It's not that I don't think harassment is a real problem, it's that I think they are often self-serving in their actions and analysis, and for them to say they're doing something because of harassment isn't enough for me anymore. We can speculate all we want about what their reasons might be, but to be so trusting as to take their harassment claim at face value isn't something I'll do.