Sunday, October 29, 2017

My Twitter Shadowban on the Fourth Anniversary of My Mother's Death

            Let’s talk about shadowbanning on Twitter for a moment. As a result of it, you might start seeing more posts from me on this blog, and maybe that’s a good thing to come of it. But this, as a whole, is not a good thing for Twitter. I’ve done my bit. I’ve contacted Twitter Support and still gotten no response, but I’m not surprised. I’ve been watching this happen to several other people on Twitter, and I knew it might find its way around to me eventually because I livetweet movies and television shows a lot. A lot. It’s almost the end of October as I write this, and the volume of my livetweeting has been perhaps higher than ever. I suppose that’s what brought down the hammer. And just what is the hammer, exactly? Apparently, the volume of my tweets triggers an automatic moderation program that labels my account as spam. In other words, I talk so much that Twitter itself muted me. People that follow me still see me IF they see my post on their timeline at the moment it was posted, but the entire back catalog of my tweets as well as any participation I have in a hashtag discussion… I might as well not be on Twitter. But the problem is that I don’t know for sure and can’t get an answer.

            This isn’t a new concept to me, but it seems to be a new one to the people running Twitter. I’ve been in chat rooms since the late 90s, and moderation protocols were put in place to control what they called “flooding” and eventually “spamming.” A person could enter a chatroom, hit one letter on the keyboard, hit enter, repeat endlessly, and thus destroy any ability to have a conversation in the room. For giggles. To settle a grudge. Because they didn’t like someone or didn’t like the topic of discussion. The reason never mattered, but these were the primitive flaws of online communication. You could “bababooey” someone endlessly, and they couldn’t cut you off. The only way to cut them off was to leave, and they won. At one point, a few chat programs suffered from hacking vulnerabilities. Someone could enter a chat room, enter a specific code of words, and cause the chat program to crash for everyone in it. Like a virus. We’re talking almost twenty years ago for this, and circumstances on Twitter are showing that things haven’t changed at all. It’s like Twitter has gone back to the drawing board completely and is trying to build a 90s chat room program from the ground up, but there’s one major difference: Twitter isn’t a tiny, grassroots, open-sourced chat program. Twitter is a large and successful business platform. Twitter doesn’t have the luxury to tinker with its users like this using automated moderation protocols, but they are doing it anyway. Automation means less real people answering questions, solving problems. Real user issues go ignored.

            But what are real users on Twitter, really? Myself, for example. I’m nobody. I’m not just nobody special. I’m nobody at all in any grand scheme of anything that I can see on Twitter or in the real world at large. I’m not newsworthy. I never got out of this town to make something of myself. I never followed my dreams to be the novelist, voice actor, or horror host I always wanted to be. I’m not a celebrity or a political analyst with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. I interact with maybe a hundred people in Twitter per month. Almost two thousand people follow me, but I don’t know most of these people. A few of these people are celebrities or people who have inspired me, and, despite that little feeling of giddiness and fanboy that any of them would find me interesting enough to acknowledge, I haven’t exchanged words with most of them because I’m nobody special. I’m one random voice. I don’t know whether or not a lot of people notice anything I say on Twitter at all. I’m just one of many average people using Twitter for the reasons I thought Twitter initially was invented: just to talk and throw thoughts out there. A communication platform. When I joined Twitter several years ago, I didn’t think this was going to be a thing for me. As I said, I already had experience with chat rooms, and this concept felt like overkill. Twitter was not only a glorified chat room but also a global chat room. Everyone could use it, and everyone could see it. Depending upon how you felt about Twitter, you could use it to talk about absolutely nothing, or you could use it as a microphone. If that microphone reached enough ears, then it could become a megaphone. You could go “viral.” This could be a good thing for anyone in need of fifteen minutes of fame as well as anyone trying to get the word out about something to a lot of people. From the beginning, I always felt like this was going to be hit and miss. No matter how successful the platform became, there always would be flaws. I felt like my activity on Twitter would be a whole lot of nothing, and I never felt like I could use it effectively as a microphone. I still feel the same way.

In the beginning, I tried to hold on to a few beliefs and inspirations about what was and always would be wrong with Twitter. I believed that it was little more than an attention-seeking device and more inclined to encourage a lot of speaking and reactionary response without a lot of deep thought. We’ve all guilty of thinking before we speak, so it’s a natural progression to be as guilty of not thinking before we type. It takes a lot of time, patience, and practice to fix that within yourself, but Twitter came with the “Internet is forever” caveat that made it harder for some to find peace, forgiveness, and resolution for their poor choices of words. Also, I go back to the words of the great Lewis Black, who once said that taking the time out to talk about what you’re doing on Twitter means spending less time doing. He was less kind in his statement, but I don’t remember the quote exactly. I know there was a “fuck you” and an “asshole” in there somewhere, and those were directed at anyone and everyone using Twitter. And he’s right. Kathleen Madigan shamed him into opening a Twitter account eventually, but he’s still right.

            I may have mentioned it on Twitter and Facebook a time or two in the past, but there is something that I haven’t considered inside my own head for too long. It’s an internal argument I used to have a lot, and I’m glad it’s come back to me because I feel a little less lost in my thoughts than I did before this paragraph. It’s called the Hawthorne effect. I would hope you take the time to look it up, but I’ll spare you the history lesson web search and just tell you that it’s the theoretical fact that organisms will change their behavior as a result of the knowledge that they are being observed. You can see this on parade on Twitter every single day. It’s not always easy to identify, but articles abound about how social media changed us and not for the better. I’ve read a few of them, but none of the articles I have read make any mention of the Hawthorne effect. I’m not a poor reader, but surely someone else mentioned it and I just overlooked it. I’ve felt its effect on me a few times. I’ve felt like some of the things I have said just aren’t my normal behavior. I’ve had to go back and analyze my words and make sure I think before I type, to make sure I’m not doing something out of character to draw attention I don’t want or need. This isn’t limited to Twitter, either. I’ve had to take time away from communication of any kind to gather my thoughts and reflect. The fact is that doing something like this and not spending as much time on Twitter in general IS my normal behavior. Spending as much time as I have on Twitter isn’t. I’ve seen Twitter used for all sorts of speech, and some of that speech has driven Twitter into a panic that makes it seem like virtually every user is being ignored when a real problem with the platform arises. The ability to multiply artificial users and magnify the Hawthorne effect has become a huge issue on Twitter following the 2016 election in particular, and there’s nothing else to call it but cyber warfare. I mean cyber warfare on any level you want to think of it: the corner of one unhinged person’s basement as he bullies other people because he has nothing better to do, or the tactical efforts of a foreign power manipulating world events. The tools have existed long enough that there is no doubt they are being used in any and every way you can imagine. For at least every hundred people trying to use such a microphone platform to spread awareness about some form of cancer, there is at least one person using the same method to spread falsehoods. The positive is that this 1/100 statistic is still pretty much the reality. The real problem is a small fraction of people abusing a social platform just as a small fraction of any given community commits any given crime. Some of them might have found a trick to make it look like they have increased their numbers with bots, but the reality is that their numbers in living human beings are that tiny fraction. Creating a hundred fake voices in their favor is little more than a variation of chat flooding, and it can be combated. The problem is that it is not being combated properly. This isn’t the story of John Henry. The response to the machine winning one race shouldn’t be to get rid of the humans and use more machines. Fighting robots with algorithms doesn’t work, and it only seeks to pressure real people into modifying their behavior on the platform to try not to look like an artificial person. And the biggest problem is that it’s a silent alarm system with no warning, answers to no one, and has no appeal.

I’ve tried to carry my understanding of the Hawthorne effect with me in my life and on social media, and I think I’ve been somewhat successful. Then again, I don’t think I’ve ever been a natural attention-seeker. I’m not a big fan of the spotlight. The irony of my unfulfilled dreams and lack of a real social life isn’t lost on me. As I sit here writing this, I can feel the difference in how I write based on the hope that someone reads it as opposed to the less formal and more personal way I would write if I were penning a secret journal I never wanted public. That’s the Hawthorne effect in a nutshell, and it can be a push in the wrong direction to be something you’re not in order to get what you need. The Hawthorne effect can be a way to rationalize away your own integrity either to seek attention or to avoid it. You have to seek attention to get a lot of things in life. You have to put yourself out there, or else you’re invisible. A ghost. And that brings us here.

As early as 2015 or even before that, a few people started slipping through the cracks. Of course, I didn’t notice this because many of them fit the same bill of Twitter nobody that I do. Most people didn’t notice. I didn’t even know this algorithm went back that far until I started discovering a handful of people writing blogs and articles elsewhere about it. People I never saw on Twitter. I didn’t know they existed. Twitter made it harder for me to find them and to know that we had something in common. I’m still going to post a link to this blog on Twitter regardless of the fact that my shadowban will deny it the attention it might deserve. Many people like myself have been suffering from this problem for a long time, and I have yet to meet anyone that has gotten a resolution from it. Some of them have written the aforementioned articles on how to fix it by contacting Twitter Ads while others file complaints with the Federal Trade Commission. Although some of these methods have worked for some users in the past, it doesn’t make the problem go away permanently. The algorithm remains in effect, and it can strike again at any time for the same mysterious reasons. We’re Twitter nobodies. We don’t matter. We are the statistic of people who fall through the cracks in society. Our paperwork gets lost. Our complaints are seen by an automated system and never rank highly enough on the priority list because bigots, politicians, celebrities, trolls, and vulgar bullies are louder than we are. All of the inboxes are flooded with complaints. We’re quiet people using Twitter for the reasons we thought Twitter was invented. We’re the people who just tell our stories, and most of them never go viral regardless of how meaningful they can be because we don’t have the follower count or just didn’t pick the right time to tell the story. We’re typically told to leave if we can’t handle how things work here, and algorithms seem to be pushing us to do it without saying a word. We, the nobodies, the average people, are the ultimate proof that Twitter isn’t for everyone even though we’re the only reason it still functions. Because we’re here. Because there’s another fraction in the statistics. About 1/100 Twitter users are high profile people. The rest are just people. Most of us take responsibility for what we say and do. Most of us are willing to accept some consequences of our actions, but an automated moderating system can’t necessarily tell what sort of consequence is in order. An automated monitoring system can’t tell if someone is talking a lot just for the sake of talking or if someone is an artificial person talking a lot because it was programmed to spew as much information out there for the highest chance that someone else will see it. I don’t use Twitter any differently now than I have in the beginning, but I’m being locked out to some extent because an automated system finds my behavior suspicious based upon other suspicious behavior. Or is it because of those few instances in which I had to take a step back and wonder if the Hawthorne effect was influencing me? The problem is that I have no clue. Am I supposed to alter my personality, use the platform less often, or stop using it altogether to correct this oversight? This is a problem, but there is a bigger one.

There’s another group of people I haven’t mentioned outside the Hawthorne effect and the attention-seekers. There are people who use Twitter because they have a genuine need to be heard. They are people suffering from trauma, depression, or just simple loneliness. In my time on Twitter, I have run across people telling stories of loss and even seen people on the verge of suicide. I’ve reached out to complete strangers on more than one occasion and let them know that they weren’t alone and that they mattered. If I weren’t shadowbanned right now, you could search through my Twitter history and find a few of those exchanges, but you can’t. I’ve taken time on solemn days of memory to share painful stories about myself in hopes that maybe someone else out there might relate to them and get something positive from it. I never asked for any responses to those stories or any pats on the back or shoulders to cry on. I just want to put the stories out there, just in case. I can’t do that today. As I write this, it’s ten minutes before 9PM. Four years ago today, on October 29, around 9PM, I spoke to my mother for the last time. It’s scary that I sat down to write this when I did, with numerous interruptions, and found myself here at this exact moment in time when I did. We’d just watched a PBS documentary on the Orson Welles radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. Earlier that day, we’d talked about Gaslight. I had just seen it for the first time, but she hadn’t. I’d hoped she would have the chance. I wanted to share it with her. Everything seemed like a normal and uneventful day, a day that would turn into another, better day. I never expected that she would be gone the next morning. After all the years of trying to help her fight her illness and working so hard toward making better lives for ourselves, I never expected it to vanish just like that. I knew that it would come eventually, but I thought that there were more years ahead. I never expected for my entire family to collapse overnight from losing her, but that was what happened. My mother didn’t just die four years ago; my entire family died with her. What passed for our family dynamic died with her, and nothing was ever the same afterward. There were things I just couldn’t do or enjoy anymore because the pain was too great, and, in a few cases, I had developed a silly superstition that a few things I used to enjoy hit too close to the event, so close that they made me afraid that something bad might happen again if I even attempted to get near them. I was watching Eddie Murphy on YouTube the night my mother died, laughing to myself and thinking about sharing those memories of laughter with her the next day, never knowing that she was already gone and that I wouldn’t have the chance. I haven’t been able to listen to an Eddie Murphy joke since. I feel like I’ve pushed him entirely out of my lexicon. The last thing I enjoyed with my mother was something we’d enjoyed most of our time together: The Carol Burnett Show. I was able to watch Carol Burnett for the first time a few months ago without crying. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do that again.

I didn’t use Twitter very much at the time. I didn’t use it exclusively. I had friends and support in a number of places, but several of those places had grown quiet or pushed me away with conflicts that I couldn’t handle. It felt harder for me to reach out to some people I had known for a long time. I’m still not sure why that is, but I guess it was just a symptom of the change in my life. It caused me to grow apart from a lot of the things that I used to do and enjoy before October 29, 2013. It made me feel less comfortable in a lot of places, but I made it look like I was doing okay because I still engaged in a lot of the same public behaviors and exercises I was known for in those small circles of friends I had. I continued to do those things because they were a way to keep my mind busy. They were a momentary escape from the pain. Still, I felt myself pulling away from places like Facebook and a chat room here and there, and I wasn’t checking my emails more than maybe once a month. When I did, I ignored a lot of emails from people I knew. I was cutting myself off from the world more and more and didn’t want to share the details of my life. I wanted to suffer in silence, and that’s never healthy. Being forced to suffer in Twitter silence from a shadowban changed perspective a little. My mother suffered greatly in silence. Addressing a few concerns might have prevented her death, but those concerns did not come to light until it was too late. Despite the coroner report that her death was accidental due to medication, I’ll never truly know whether or not she committed suicide, but I’ll always know that it was a possibility and something that she had attempted in the past. In the days following her death, I completely shut down. I spoke to a few people to let them know what had happened, but most of the details are a blur of crowd noise, tears, and pats on the shoulder. I didn’t want to be there, so I went somewhere else in my mind. As things got quieter and a tiny fraction of the pain began to heal, I began to feel a need to start reaching out again. Coming back to Twitter was an endurance test for me. I had almost no followers and never really sought them out, so it had remained one part live journal, one part self-help therapy, and one part just throwing out quotes from movies, radio and television. I still didn’t see any real use in it, and I was on the verge of leaving again. What drew me back to it in the first place, however, was the livetweet community, specifically #TCMParty, a group of Twitter uses who would watch Turner Classic Movies together and run commentary. This is exactly what I had been doing in my old circles of friends for almost twenty years, and it went back long before I discovered the Internet as I watched old horror movies in the back room of a comic book store with a few people after closing time on a Saturday night. I’d been watching TCM alone a lot shortly before and after my mother died, and it was one of the only cable channels I had worth watching, second only to MeTV at the time. Slipping into that world of the past helped to take the edge off. One Saturday afternoon, TCM let some of the fans pick the movies, and among those fans were the founders and supporters of #TCMParty. When I returned to Twitter, a place I’d used more often than not to quote riffs from Mystery Science Theater 3000, I discovered that this was what #TCMParty and other livetweeting hashtags were really doing. They were riffing. This was something I felt comfortable and practiced in doing. This was something in which I had at least a little confidence that I could participate, and it convinced me to stick around as I began to meet a new group of people who shared my wide variety of tastes. It became a confidence-builder, and I began to use it to live out a couple of my unfulfilled dreams on a small scale when I began to host livetweets of my own. I loved being able to pick out things I loved and to share them with others. This blog is largely the result of that, and most of the early posts on it are synopses and promotions of those livetweets. It was something I loved doing and something that started pulling some inspiration out of me that I thought had fizzled out.

I didn’t want to make this a long entry. I almost feel like I’ve lost track because it’s so easy for me to make too many sightseeing stops on Memory Lane on the road to a point, but I haven’t lost the point. I’m here talking about it instead of talking about it on Twitter right now. I made a few comments on Twitter today about the memory of my mother’s passing, but I had to remember that the number of people I expected to be able to see it, even though that number is very low in the grand scale of Twitter, is very limited due to my shadowban. I had to remember that any random stranger out there could have been looking for a keyword in a Twitter search and maybe suffering from some similar pain, but they won’t find me. In this past year, I have felt a little more confident to let a little more of myself out on Twitter and in the real world, but I’m still not using Twitter for anything more than I ever did. I’m not bullying people or taking part in anyone’s controversial politics or sending chain mail scams or pretending to be a Nigerian prince. I’m not using foul language on a regular basis or directing any foul language at all toward anyone else on Twitter. I’m not that sort of person. I have manners. I’m livetweeting movies like I always do, and the month of October is my heaviest for livetweeting because I love Halloween and, in part, because I am indulging in an October happiness overload in an attempt to pull my mind away from unhappy memories like the one I have to face today, the memory of losing my mother four years ago. I’m about to join another movie livetweet, but I have to do so with the knowledge that a lot of people probably won’t be able to have a conversation with me on the hashtag because they don’t use some third party program like Tweetdeck to bypass a shadowban. Even Tweetdeck has been iffy lately and caused some communication to have gaps in it. Under a large handful of circumstances, I don’t exist on Twitter right now.

I try to imagine what a shadowban like this might have done to me a year ago, two years ago, or three years ago when I was facing this difficult time of year and felt Twitter was one of the best outlets for it. “You’re being punished and should have thought about that ahead of time,” some of you might say in support of the algorithm, but what the hell am I being punished for? Twitter doesn’t have an answer. “You must have triggered something somehow.” That’s the only answer the nobodies get. The silent treatment. “You know what you did.” No, I don’t. “Yes, you do.” No. I don’t. “Well, you must have done SOMETHING.” Who is running the ship? My emotional state is sufficiently higher than it was a year ago. I remember the Hawthorne effect. I’m capable of suffering this trivial injustice myself, but it’s not really trivial because it’s not just happening to me. And I didn’t suddenly start caring that it was happening when it started happening to me, either. I’ve been seeing it for a long time. I see it happen unfairly to more and more people using Twitter and can see the sort of ramifications that can come of it. It’s a case of innocent voices going unheard and being punished because they have slipped through the cracks. It’s not outrageous to suggest that Twitter becomes indirectly or even directly responsible for lives being lost and relationships falling apart when this sort of failure in communication happens.

The thing about this shadowban algorithm is that a lot of people don’t know that it’s affected them right away. A few of them just might think that everyone else all of a sudden just stopped giving a shit. Perhaps we shouldn’t worry about whether or not anyone does, but that’s not the point. It’s not an outright suspension, but it can limit your account on such a subtle level that you’re unaware that you’re being punished at all. You start to feel it in increments, but it feels like something else entirely. You can’t call this moderation or punishment or discipline when users don’t know when it’s being implemented or why or how. It’s trying to have a decentralized chat program and a moderated one at the same time, and that doesn’t work. You can’t say that you’re responsible for what some Twitter users say and do while denying that same responsibility to other Twitter users, ignoring them and letting a robotic nanny handle it. Someone might be sharing a painful memory, trying to get the word out about something important that they know someone else will see, but it will go unseen and ignored because Twitter decided to hide it. I follow a few people that spent a lot of time retweeting information about a dog meat festival in China. This is horrible, and I didn’t want to know about it. But I needed to know about it and am glad I do. At a point past my awareness, however, it became too much for me to handle emotionally, so do you know what I did? I muted a few of those people. I turned off their retweets. I did what was necessary for me to avoid those things for my mental state. I didn’t need a robotic spam filter to turn it off and silence those people for me or anyone else, but that can happen now and has. Silencing them in this manner is not only unnecessary but also damaging. Someone could be posting a handful of links to articles on mental health or suicide. That could be part of their profession, but they can’t possibly know what sort of limit there is to how much of it they can put up before the spam alarm goes off. And it shouldn’t go off at all. Not for them or people like them. They shouldn’t have to do research on mysterious reasons for being silenced or even contact a certain office about paying to get their voice back. I think about what effect this might have had on me before today, and I can’t say how I would react. I might have left and stopped using Twitter completely. I still have the power to do that, and Twitter doesn’t seem to understand that this is the only real reason Twitter can keep running. Because we stay.

Then I think about the strangers I saw, some completely by accident. I think about when I reached out to those people, and I realize that, for seemingly no reason at all other than triggering a faulty automation system, there could be more people in similar situations that I can’t see at all, people right now that need an ear and picked Twitter as their voice. I can’t reach out to them because Twitter refuses to acknowledge they exist, by fault or by design. They, like me, had to stay and keep using Twitter to find a voice, and they, like me, are being punished for… something. We don’t really know what it is because Twitter won’t tell us. Twitter is too busy trying to be a business, and perhaps they have forgotten that we are the business model. We are the advertisers and promoters. We’re not bots. We’re not spewing political memes or hate speech. We’re not people who are routinely given a lot of attention or the target of other people’s vitriol. We’re just people, average Twitter users, and Twitter’s automated moderation can’t tell real people from fake people anymore, it seems. It’s acceptable to Twitter for real people to be lumped into those categories and to slip through the cracks whether or not some of us survive the experience. And some of us won’t. Some of us will leave, some of us will die, and some of us will lose relationships we should have or could have had if Twitter were more hands-on with its programming. That’s just how the statistics work, on Twitter just as much as outside in the middle of any average city street, and Twitter needs to take responsibility for it just as any social media or communication platform should. Will they? I’m not holding my breath right now. Especially when even their robot answering machines won’t return my calls.


So now I return to whatever there is outside of this writing, be it livetweeting about movies, even though I know a lot of people won’t see me, or whatever else it is I choose to do in the dead of night on this painful anniversary when everyone else in my personal life is asleep, enjoying their own new paths in life, and probably won’t even bring up the anniversary at all or ask anyone how they’re doing. For some of them, it’s just another day. For me, it’s not just another day yet. At least I’m not suicidal.

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