4/2/23 Today I quit Twitter

I didn't completely quit Twitter, I still have an active account but I have no plans on posting there anymore, at least for the foreseeable future. It seems that my account has been targeted and I am at risk of being permanently banned. I don't need that bull dookies so I left.

It all began after Musk, heretofore referred to as Muskrat, bought the site. I had spent many a tweet insulting him long before the takeover and I kept doing so. However things started to change, both site wide and with my personal account, despite muskrat's promise to get rid of bots I started to get a lot of unwanted and aggressive replies. I would report them but get a message that the person hadn't broken any of Twitters rules, lie. Then came the selling of the Blue Checkmarks, these accounts were even worse, one posted a pedo photo and when reported Twitter did nothing, clearly buying a checkmark also bought you immunity. 

Then came February, I began to realize that my engagements on Twitter had dropped to almost nothing and I had to actively seek out the people I follow, even though they had tweeted something within the last hour, only Blue Checkmarks and ads were popping up in my timeline. I posted a poll asking people to respond if they could see my question and I got zero responses. Yep, just as I suspected, I had been shadow banned, my account was still active, my tweets were still being posted but nobody was seeing them. And then came the final straw.

I left a comment about trump, hoping he suffered a stroke and all the bad things that come after it. Within seconds my account was blocked for 12 hours. The account that I had been responding to had wished death upon trump but they weren't banned, Blue Checkmark in case you were wondering. I realized that tweeting "trump" was like saying Voldemort in Harry Potter, it was a trigger word that alerted the twitter censors and they pounced. I also realized that they were targeting me and anything I posted that could be interpreted as "against the rules" would result in my account being permanently blocked. Screw muskrat.

So today I posed a farewell. I know, it's cheesy to go on a site and loudly announce you are leaving but nobody is paying attention anyhow plus I hate when someone goes radio silent and I have to wonder if they blocked me. The message was for any of my former followers who wondered why I wasn't active anymore. I changed my avatar to the classic Fail Whale and put the image of a Closed sign on my banner. I also locked my account so only people I follow can still see it. 

So until things change I have no plans on going back, except once a month to announce what I've done with all the time I wasted on Twitter, to make sure they don't shut me down for being an inactive account. Since this is day one all I did was my normal housework and prepared a canvass for a future painting. Meanwhile I'm back to blogging. Thus ends day one without Twitter.