Yesterday I was suspended on twitter for the dumbest of reasons: I was defending a woman known as Nerdette or Tristen on youtube from a very frightening piece of harassment she was receiving by an unhinged gamma male who was leaving comments of the level that she probably should be calling the police on him.
Here’s the beginning of the comment, though it goes on for two more screenshots worth of abusive, frightening rambling:
I’m very sympathetic to anyone who receives this kind of abuse because I know full well how hard it is with the death threats and threats to children I received back when Worldcon and SFWA decided to pick on me for my political beliefs.
Someone’s stalking my feed though and just looking for code words to try to get Twitter to hit me, though. Because anyone could see that all I was doing was talking to a friend/follower about the situation, not bothering anyone, and defending a woman from harassment.
For this, I was reported. Meaning there’s people out there just trying to target and deplatform me regardless of reason. It’s another form of harassment which doesn’t get as reported, because it’s not as crazy as what’s going on with Tristen, but these people want to hurt my business and livelihood at all costs – and that’s the kind of thing that when SFWA bans me from their club for receiving abuse, just escalates because these people think they’re justified in doing this to me.
It’s really sad to watch, and it’s even sadder to watch how lame Twitter’s become in recent months since they decided they will be taking an active part in trying to influence the 2020 election on behalf of Democrats.
What can I do though? All I’ve got is just keeping making books. You can support on Patreon and ensure it keeps going. Subscribe here.
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