I made a joke to a friend over Twitter where I stated that I’m a sociopath and have no empathy for anyone. Yes, the person knew it was a joke and even liked the tweet because even though we’ve never met, or know anything about each other than what we’ve tweeted, this person knows that I was just kidding, For some people though, that same tweet may evoke a different response. I know this to be true because in the past, I;ve made similar where I’ve received death threats. Not many, over the years maybe 3 or 4 but to me that’s enough to place me on guard.
Each time i received a tweet that looked to me to be directly threatening to me or my family, I reported the tweet. Again, they’ve been rare but I would think that Twitter would take immediate action. After each report, i thought I may receive something from he company about the resolution: I never saw anything. That’s not saying that nothing happened to the person sending the threat, it’s just I sort of expected a response saying at minimum, that they were looking into it. Every time, a few days later, I would look to see if the person who threatened me were either suspended or banned.
In each case, none of those I reported appeared to have any action taken against them. Their accounts were still active and i guess they may have been making threats against other people as well. This is what many of us have said is the subjective enforcement of Twitter rules actually means. A conservative may receive threats but then Twitter will suspend or ban accounts of people using the hashtag #Learntocode. Go figure. Of course Twitter never suspended any of those same that when it was announced by the previous administration that they were all going to lose their jobs and that they needed to “Learn to Code”. But those same journalists were deemed a protected class by Twitter after they were laid off because their crappy outlets are failing. There seems to be a lot of that happening on that platform.
Maybe, for me, it’s time to take another break from Twitter as I did a few years ago. Of course, I’ll still use it as a vehicle for announcing new posts, but maybe that should be the extent of how I use it, at least for a while.
Conservative Skeptic 
Just for the heck of it, Jim, how much time would you guess that you spend on Twitter?
LikeLike
3-4 hours per day. Yes, a lot. But that’s a lot less than I used to before I ledt a few years ago. I took a year or so off, completely, because I was on Twitter from daylight to bedtime, 7 days a week. It became an addiction of sorts. But now I find that even the 3-4 hours per day is too much and I’ve been thinking for a while I neeed to curtail that. So I’m going to. It may be that I only spend 1-2 hours a day, and then reevaluate at that point. An hour per day I think would be enough to keep up with topics I’m interested in.
LikeLike
Wow! I have often wondered how much time people spent keeping up with all their social media connections. I doubt that your time is an unusual amount for many.
Twitter and FaceBook move so quick that taking a day away from it makes one fall way behind. I decided not to put myself in that position again rather soon after joining an atheist “forum” on FaceBook years ago and finding that I couldn’t keep up and then didn’t want to.
I prefer the less traveled places, where discussion is more considered before posting. I would, actually, be most happy if somehow the rapid-fire conversation of Twitter, FaceBook and all else simply came to an end. I think these places and types of discussions have been the ruination of more than just our civl discourse.
But…that isn’t going to happen without some major social trauma.
LikeLike