Twitter problems.

Last night while I was live tweeting the State of the Union, my account became locked. Twitter did not provide me with any reason or rule that I violated and only said that my account was displaying "inauthentic activity". What activity that could be is beyond me since I've had my account for five years now and have, as far as I know, never broken any rules.

Seriously, all I do is tweet out comments (that I self censor in order to keep inside the terms of service) and links to this very blog. I almost never comment on other people's post and basically only interact with people that have either followed more or are being polite. If anyone tries to pick a fight or is rude I just block them. Nothing there sounds inauthentic to me.

But my account was locked anyways and I don't see any reason why. I was able to get my account back but only after giving Twitter my phone number, using a captcha and then entering a code that they gave me. I didn't want to do it but I didn't see any other way to do so. Plus it was in the middle of one of the best State of the Union speeches I have seen and I wanted to comment on it! My account was unlocked and everything seems to be back to normal now, though I am not comfortable at all with having to give Twitter my phone number.

I don't think there was any reason for my account to be locked, but you can check it for yourself now that it is back. My account is @politicswarblog. My tweets last night were mostly boiler plate GOP stuff and very little of it was anything other than me repeating what the President said. I wasn't being mean, I wasn't spamming links and I am certainly not a bot. So what gives?

My guess is that it was purely political. Some stupid algorithm detected my account posting about politics and that algorithm decided that my five year old account was "suspicious". Why I don't know but I doubt it was reported by anyone since nobody had any reason to report my account as the one or two liberals that were talking trash were blocked immediately and they weren't accusing me of being a bot or anything anyways.

I think it is another case of posting while conservative. The big tech companies, Twitter included, are biased against conservatives and want them exiled from polite society. It doesn't matter the actual content, anyone that disagrees with their social justice beliefs is labeled a "Russian bot" and it is up to them to prove otherwise. I was able to do so with their verification procedure but the whole thing is insulting. Just let people say what they want and don't worry so much about the Russian bogyman. It's not hard.

I do worry that my account may end up being banned anyways. Ever since Milo Yianpollis was banned from Twitter, they have gone on a rampage of banning accounts that are either supportive of the president, conservative, or are critical of liberals. I do all three so there is a decent chance of me being banned. Before this incident I had largely escaped this fate but who knows what will happen next.

I have prepared for that eventuality. I do, of course, have a Facebook page that you can like. Unlike Twitter though, I rarely ever post anything besides links there, but that could change if I get banned from Twitter (assuming I don't get banned their as well). I also have an account on Gab.Ai. Though the account has hardly any followers, I do cross post everything I write on twitter there and if my Twitter account goes down, I can still use Gab, despite the user base being smaller and more weird. Finally, I have a Google+ page but that is going away in April anyways and is hardly worth mentioning.

The problem is that if I am banned from Twitter it will make promoting this blog harder. I don't get that many views from the platform, but it is a source of readers that I would prefer to not have cut off. I would still have my main source, Facebook, but it would cut down on my views considerably. I could always make a new account but I would have to start up again from scratch and would always have to worry about being banned again. Gab is kind of a ghost town and would not be a good replacement.

I really wish something could be done about the way these tech companies are acting...