Alan Wolfe (Atrix256/Demofox) Banned (?) From X (Twitter)

“…private tyrannies <are> the worst kind of tyrannies” — Noam Chomsky (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR1jzExZ9T0).

“cruel, unreasonable, or arbitrary use of power or control.” — definition of tyranny as given by google.com, emphasis is mine.

Hey All!

It appears I’ve been banned from X (twitter). I’m writing this post to show some details of this process, as well as let people know what happened instead of me just being “disappeared” quietly.

First the process of being banned.

I log in on Friday and it says I’m suspended. It tells you that you can appeal it by “proving you haven’t broken any rules” but it doesn’t tell you what you are accused of.

After maybe a day and a half I get to thinking “you know, I don’t think I should be suspended for what I said”, so I appeal, and within 30 seconds get an email that says the appeal is denied. It only then tells me what I’m accused of.

It still doesn’t tell me the punishment: is this temporary? Is it permanent? I’ve heard of people having 3 day suspensions, but 3 days have come and gone so I’m unsure if the suspension will ever be lifted. It might be lifted tomorrow, in 6 months, or never. Who knows!

Putting this in legal terms, imagine…

  1. You get arrested. You are not told what you are arrested for, nor how long you will be imprisoned.
  2. You are told you can write a letter to a judge explaining how you didn’t break the law.
  3. You write this letter, and when you hand it to the guard, he already has a response in his hand that he hands back to you.
  4. End of conversation, you sit in jail, perhaps never to see daylight again.

Getting banned from a social media platform is not the same as being jailed, but it is a good analogy to show the level of “justice” that the platform is interested in.

When made physical, it’s akin to places like Iran or China dealing with political dissidents or other undesirables. This is why we need to be careful about conflating corporate culture with American values.

It’s also worth mentioning that through a normal course of actions, I was banned from paypal many years ago because it assumed I was a fraudulent scammer for some reason that was unappealable. Elon was involved there as well. I was just doing regular things and it came out of no where.

This isn’t the first time twitter has gotten mad at me for things I’ve said. I wished ill will at several GOP politicians, including Trump, and twitter used to have the policy of “you are banned until you delete this specific post”. But, this is the first time since Elon took over.

A short time before this happened, John Carmack was asking why folks were trying to leave X and that he couldn’t understand it, could it really be spite? I wanted to post my response to his question but it’s been deleted! Most of my tweets are still there and I can see them, but this specific one criticizing Elon Musk is gone. Could this be part of the motivation for where I’m at now? Was i flagged as “kick out and don’t let back in, at the slightest hint of it being ok to do so?”

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1699060703272010047?s=20

My response to John was that Elon was making poor decisions, destabilizing the platform, and I didn’t trust him to have good intentions.

Ok so why the suspension?

Have a look at what kicked it off. Trigger warning: police violence against women.

https://x.com/Atrix256/status/1702400552032936032?s=20 x link no longer works, so i put the youtube vid is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU4VGQruhQc . The “lucky that wasn’t fatal” attack happens 45 seconds in.

A local police department (this incident happened 30 minutes from my house, and my first game dev job is literally a street away) is shown having an altercation with a WEDDING party, in which the police start throwing punches at women, in nice dresses and high heels. One of them hits the back of her head against the ground and is knocked out.

Hitting the back of your head like that is no joke. That’s where your brain is connected to the rest of your body. My old martial arts teacher, an ex marine, called it the “dumb knot” and let us know how dangerous it was so we could train safely, and also know the implications for self defense type situations.

Seeing that pissed me off. Yes, there was some “drunken idiocy” going on, including reports that a woman tried to grab one of the officer’s guns (if they can be trusted). Assuming so, you might ask me “ok so what SHOULD they have done if not that?”. Honestly, not sure, but NOT THAT. The woman who got knocked out was essentially choke slammed to the ground to make her hit her head in a life threatening way. That was intentional – it was a guided fall straight onto the back of her head where her spine connects to her skull – and should be considered attempted murder, frankly.

What I believe specifically got me suspended though is someone made a comment that nobody got shot. My response was “yeah, those cops better watch out next time for a good guy with a gun”. Playing off the arguments about how the solution to gun violence is more armed people, and also that we are pretty powerless when police go beast mode like this, just acting completely out of line. How many videos have we seen of police violently beating people in handcuffs who never resisted? Especially protestors. Or reporters and MEDICS at protests. This bullshit has to stop.

What happened to you being the champion of free speech Elon? The truth is, you only want the speech you agree with to be free, and that makes you a dangerous idiot.

People considering going to mars with this guy, go watch Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger to get an idea of what that would be like.

Anyhow, catch me on mastodon and blue sky assuming this suspension is permanent (It’s the halting problem, so no idea). It’s you, my connections and our awesome community that I value most, so if it ends up not being permanent, see you on x til it sinks or is under significantly different management – hopefully soon!

Also, someone make sure John Carmack sees this, as a better answer to his post I linked above 🙂

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26 comments

  1. Such a disgrace.
    I’m an avid reader of your posts, so this will get me to finally use my Mastodon account! Still waiting for BlueSky to give me an account…

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  3. Being thrown in jail is not a good analogy at all, you have no guaranteed right to use free web services. I would suggest you should take responsibility for your actions instead of trying to blame Elon who had nothing to do with your breaking of twitter policy or the specific enforcement actions. Are you going to be promoting shooting people on Mastodon as well?

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  4. Yeah, this is very topical with my X post. I have appreciated many of your tweets over the years, and the platform would be poorer without you.

    I would have liked to see screenshots of the exact text in the app announcing your suspension and what you were accused of after the denied appeal. I would be surprised if it actually said, as you quote, “proving you haven’t broken any rules”. Shots of the offending posts would also be nice. All easy to say in hindsight, but admittedly unreasonable to expect you to have taken them in the moment.

    I absolutely agree that the suspension notice should clearly point at the rule and evidence, and clearly state the duration and appeal process. I had a twitter suspension once some years ago, and it was indeed mysterious.

    What did you put in your appeal? I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an auto-deny if you just submitted an empty form, for instance.

    Was this the reason given?
    https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/violent-speech#:~:text=You%20may%20not%20incite%2C%20promote,humanity%2C%20war%20crimes%20or%20genocide.

    You might be permanently banned based on that, but they should certainly say clearly one way or another. Posting with the tone you described, if you swapped the environment so the cops were jews or trans activists, would almost certainly rile a lot of people up, and consistency should be a virtue, right? Whether vague incitements to violence should be bannable offenses is a fair discussion, but it isn’t a recent change.

    You were rage-baited, and you fired away into a charged conversation. Reassess with the following:

    There is indeed another video showing the woman struggling to pull the officer’s gun from his holster while his back was turned, apparently thwarted only by the holster retention device, and she was struck, but not as you say “essentially choke slammed to the ground to make her hit her head in a life threatening way. That was intentional – it was a guided fall straight onto the back of her head where her spine connects to her skull – and should be considered attempted murder, frankly.”
    https://x.com/donutoperator/status/1702399581743431774?s=46&t=7DUsFjkDZGc7dfsNI9KsmQ

    You admitted that you had been banned before (multiple times?), and this was the first time under Elon, so it doesn’t seem like the experience has dramatically degraded for you. With your “dangerous idiot” language, it really does look like a personal spite issue.

    Regardless, I sincerely hope you get back on the platform.

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    • I appreciate the response and information John!
      It’s been cool being able to chat with you in that forum, after growing up in wolf/doom1 days trying to learn game dev. I was just about to try and jump from blizzard to occulus and then you folks moved to Texas. Much respect from my side and I appreciate the response.
      Take it easy man 🙂

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    • I got a 3 day suspension when I said of some particularly vile criminal who had just been found guilty – “I hope he dies in prison”. It happened WITHIN SECONDS. Therefore, they had a rule that said if string == “I hope [he|she] dies [in prison|….]” then auto suspend with no right of appeal. Yet if someone has a pattern of repeated, intentional racism, hate speech, transphobia those complaints are denied or just asked to take down the one offending post. This is an utterly broken platform. You get banned for remarks that are understandable in context and not banned for patterns of behaviour that no platform should tolerate, even supposedly Twitter. So no wonder people have a problem with with the platform.

      As for Elon Musk I have to wonder what he’d actually do different if his intention all along wasn’t to make the platform a toxic cesspit that loses money hand over fist.

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      • Are you ok? I never see anything racist or whatever on the platform. Maybe you should follow sane people instead of peers? If you go looking for shit because you’re a fly, I figure it’s your own fault.
        Also, glad to see some actual idiocy being dealt with. At what point in history did we decide that it’s worse to call someone a nagger than to hope someone dies? “Oh but it was just about (person whose opinion I don’t share), lulz, he deserves it.” Jesus Christ. Absolute morons.

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  5. With you being off the platform, Twitter’s value has further degraded… 😦
    In the end, I’m more and more convinced that self-hosted open platforms like blogs are the only ones we can trust to rely on through the test of time. Closed, proprietary, walled garden platforms only come and go at the whims of their upper management…

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  6. You gotta be pretty ignorant to believe this is Elons fault.

    Without Elon, Twitter would have already went bankrupt.

    The only changes to site are new features until the company is no longer losing money.

    It’s obvious why you got banned, wishing for death of someone is a borderline threat. I doubt it’s a permanent ban though.

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      • Are you ok? Did you not know Twitter was bleeding money worse than anything? They had like 99% worthless employees, who were happily booted pretty quick. If you don’t know shit, why are you spewing shit on the internet?

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  7. Super bummer. You’re one of my favorite tweeters. I followed you on linked in just because that’s the only other real social media I use (besides fb, but for baby pictures only really). Hope to see you on twitter again some time.

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  8. I have to be honest man, it isn’t surprising you got banned.
    More and more you are conflating your technical posts with political views. Heads up, no one gives a shit what you believe in regards to politics on Twitter — ironically your behavior continues again with this post by attacking Elon. I’m certain you are smart enough to know that a single individual isn’t the cause of your posts coming under the microscope, and furthermore that the exact same type of behavior was happening under the previous leadership for a different demographic of users.
    Surprise, you aren’t unique, you aren’t special.
    There are no arguments to be won on the internet, and your political protest isn’t activism, it’s just retarded.
    Your departure from the platform doesn’t make it any better or worse. In fact, my timeline has slightly improved without having to read your incessant complaining about Elon. Now if I want to find it, I can bookmark your blog — but I won’t.

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  10. The second camera angle shows her coming up on a cop currently engaged and yanking at a gun. Then it looks like the cop turns or spins and she goes down. Immediately ending the threat of someone pulling a gun is critical. What is she figured it out and then shot a few people?

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  12. I’m absolutely floored recently with how poor people have been behaving. A couple of assholes at NVIDIA get promoted after screwing you and patenting your work (Spatiotemporal Bluenoise), now X (Elon Musk) is trying to join the likes of Moms for Liberty (book burners/banners), defining yet again what is free speech?
    Where did all of this irrationality come from? Free speech *was* already defined in our societies, and the laws should have been sealed/final. Why are these idiots being listened to?
    Oh yeah!
    Cheeto! Ever since Cheeto became a world leader and President of the United States, the world started to become more irrational. That “leader” is not a good model for other leaders to model. Irrationality has an uncanny ability to “spread”, influencing some more than others.
    But hey,
    Cheeto wants to “Make America Great Again”, just like Adolf Hitler wanted to “Make Germany Great Again”

    History is repeating, *we are not evolving if we continue to make the same mistakes.

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  13. For what it’s worth your twitter feed was one of the small handful of webpages I would visit every day to see what’s new and interesting in the world of graphics research. Thanks for that!

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