My Record for Lifetime Twitter Bans Will Never Be Surpassed
I’ll miss you, Twitter; but we’ll always have Deutsche Bank.
[Cross-posted from Facebook, where I post things out of spite]
In the 24 hours since my latest unexplained 30-day suspension here at Facebook ended yesterday morning, several people have asked me about the situation with Twitter, which last year granted me the world record in “permanent bans” (four: the first three were each quickly reversed in the wake of noisy objections from my colleagues over the suspicious nature of the “violations” in question, which included posting an email showing that Twitter partner Palantir lied about its role in a 2011 plot to discredit journalists and labor leaders; finally, most of my colleagues lost interest, as they’re wont to do, so the fourth ban finally stuck).
So, here’s the deal with that:
1. The Twitter account of my non-profit, Pursuance, was suspended without explanation this month about half an hour after I posted several screenshots showing (1) then-Wall Street Journal reporter David Enrich offering to cease bothering the other members of a family whose father had been found dead of an apparent suicide a week prior if the eldest son, Val Broeksmit, agreed to meet with him to talk about what his father had known about his employer, Deutsche Bank; and (2) an email I sent to New York Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades-Ha with questions regarding Enrich’s more recent conduct as business editor at that outlet, his relationship with Deutsche Bank, and the role his fellow business editor Nick Summers played in the publication of a December article attacking Broeksmit. I sent those questions to Rhoades-Ha on the express invitation of Enrich himself, who had suddenly ceased answering my questions after Enrich — or more likely a far more competent third party, such as a NYT lawyer — realized I knew all the answers to the questions I was asking, due to my possession of audio recordings and several years of correspondence that show him to have lied about matters involving Trump, a famously criminalized banking empire, the 2016 election, and whether the media needs to be torn down and rebuilt in my own image.
2. You can see screenshots on Twitter itself, where they’ve been posted by Broeksmit himself, Leah McElreth, and Scott Stedman — who himself also ran into trouble with Twitter some months back when he pursued the exact same combination of DB and Enrich. I’d post them here, but I’m not ready to get illicitly banned again until I’ve crossed a couple things off my ever-present list. At any rate, you’ll be able to catch up on this and other, similar failures on the part of the quasi-competent pseudo-elite in the form of certain other projects that may prove harder to derail than my struggling little non-profit. You can also see Twitter respond, with unusual haste, to an inquiry by reporter David Gilmore via his Twitter account as well, where he’s posted a screenshot of their response that Pursuance was banned for “spam and platform manipulation” — something they’ve refused to elaborate on. As my buddy Erin Gallagher noted after I went crying to her about all this the other day, these Twitter bans don’t seem to apply quite as forcefully to the various white supremacists that she and I have been in the habit of documenting in recent years (although I’d recently stopped because it’s a waste of time, like telling Thomas Friedman that the Saudi crown prince isn’t actually morally superior to Edward Snowden and that this is a fucked up thing to have to point out).
3. In conclusion, a lot of people forget about Gilbert Gottfried, or even dismiss him as some sort of minor novelty act with no real importance in the world of comedy, but those people are punks.
