Hello From Twitter Jail
By: Andy Daly
Tags: Elections, Twitter, Social Media, Voting

Dear reader, I am writing this post on a roll of metaphorical toilet paper here in Twitter jail, where I have been held without a metaphorical trial for the past eight days. Hear my tale!

On August 27, I sat down to do some phone banking through The Democratic Party of Wisconsin, because I am trying to save the world!, and I fired off this tweet to my 150,000 followers:

Four days later, I tried to log into Twitter for a nice morning hit off the like pipe but, for the first time in my 11 years as an unpaid content provider/addict, I could not log in! I was told that that tweet, that dumb one right up there, had been found to be in violation of Twitter’s rule against “spreading false or misleading information about voting”. Wha?! Because of this, I could not log into my Twitter account until I deleted the tweet, at which point it would be replaced by a notice saying “this tweet is unavailable because it violated our rules”. As soon as I did that, I was told, I could go right back to reading upsetting headlines and making jokes that ten thousand people have already beaten me to.

But I was also given the option of appealing Twitter’s judgement. As you can see, the tweet in question doesn’t contain any information about voting, true or false. Nothing in that tweet could mislead anyone anywhere. It’s just a bored homebound comedian trying to brag about his world saving civic engagement and maybe inspire some other folks to get involved too (But I was mostly bragging, let’s be clear — and if there were a rule against that, Twitter would be such a quiet and lonely place I hate to even imagine it). I felt I had no choice but to file an appeal.

I had no idea what process had led to my tweet being flagged. Did another Twitter user report it? Who? Why? What were they thinking? Was it a human being at twitter dot com who decided that my tweet violated a rule or was it an algorithm? Does Jack Dorsey toss off ten of these rulings a day, the way President Obama used to read ten letters a day from regular citizens, something which the current President probably couldn’t do even if he wanted to and Lord oh Lord does he not want to? I had no idea.

And I certainly don’t know how the appeals process works, if there even is one. Maybe I’m the first idiot who didn’t just delete his dumb tweet and hurry back to piling on Chuck Woolery (or whatever people are doing on Twitter these days). Maybe Twitter is scrambling to come up with an appeals process right now because Andy Daly demanded it. I have no idea. All I know is that eight days ago, Twitter promised to respond to my appeal “as soon as possible”. It simply isn’t possible to respond any sooner than they will, eventually (I hope), respond.

Suddenly being without my Twitter account was a strange feeling. Of course, I wanted badly to explain to my followers why I wasn’t there anymore but I have somehow neglected to get all their email addresses. In desperation, I have taken to Instagram and tried to turn it into Twitter.

My Instagram followers have been very kind but how long can I expect them to tolerate these text only posts? I suppose I could alternate — text post, photo of a 7th grade Andy Daly wearing a fedora to school, text post, picture of my dog eating the remote control, so on. But that doesn’t seem quite satisfactory as a permanent arrangement.

There are, of course, mental health benefits to taking a twitter break, these particular ravings notwithstanding, but having this break forced on me arbitrarily has been disquieting. If they had flagged either of these tweets (from the same thread as the flagged tweet)…

… I would have been amused by Twitter’s inability to identify a joke but also impressed by their vigilance. I would have happily deleted those tweets. But I can find nothing to be either amused or impressed by in the current sloppy situation. And it also, by the way, bugs me that this tweet is still hanging out on Twitter:

That contains information about voting that is both false and misleading. This guy’s poor parents, who I’m sure never asked to be dragged into their son’s social media baloney, actually received a notice explaining that their son would be getting a ballot in the mail. They didn’t get a ballot. But furthermore, I’m thinking there’s a reason the state of California isn’t set up to remove everyone from the voter rolls as soon as they move. The possibility that someone who’s registered to vote in two different states would commit what is often a felony of voting in both places and go through all the effort to do so is not a significant enough threat to the integrity of our elections that it warrants committing resources to paying attention to where exactly Jarrett lives right now! Also, I have no specific information on this, but I suspect Jarrett might be exaggerating how long it’s been since he lived with his parents. I mean, who wouldn’t round up to the nearest decade? Let’s say it’s more like eight years and he still has his CD collection in their attic. But who knows? The point is that his tweet is still up there and he’s still merrily undermining mail-in voting and I have been banned from reading any of it until I falsely confess to doing the thing this guy did. It’s weird.

To be clear, I don’t assume malfeasance or any agenda here. I don’t flatter myself to think that anyone at Twitter has targeted me for silencing. I suspect this is just good old fashioned incompetence combined with the maddening opacity of private sector bureaucracies. Given the state of our democracy I have no beef with Twitter wishing to err on the side of caution in these matters but, y’know, it’d be more reassuring if they seemed to know what they were doing.

At some point, my desire to self-promote on Twitter may overwhelm my sense of justice and I may delete my dumb tweet, but for now I stand, stupidly, firm!