When Twitter suspended my account on January 22nd, I submitted an appeal within hours. It’s now March 1st, but I’ve received no update from Twitter on the status of my appeal or the reinstatement of my 13-year-old Twitter account, which was suspended based on dubious allegations that several tweets — tweets that were weeks and months old — violated Twitter’s most recent ToS, despite the fact that the specified terms did not even exist when those tweets were posted.
When I submitted my initial appeal, I decided to be a good girl & play by Twitter’s rules, committing myself to resist the urge to evade suspension by logging into the other Twitter accounts I’ve set up for various reasons over the past 13 years. If you know me, you know patience is not one of my virtues and being a good girl isn’t in my nature. That said, I didn’t want to give Twitter justification to deny my appeal by claiming that I attempted to evade suspension by continuing to tweet using other active Twitter accounts I control. My patience is a finite resource and I knew it would run out, so I decided I’d remain on my best behavior until March 1st. Well, it’s March 1st and my patience has run out.
Rather than continue waiting for Twitter to make a final decision regarding the future of my account, I’ve pulled @AlyssonFergison out of mothballs. While I ultimately hope Twitter will reinstate my account, I have no reason to believe that will actually happen, nor any idea if I’ll ever receive a response from them regarding its status. So, I’m starting over from scratch… with zero tweets and zero followers, which I must admit — after 13 years on that platform — is somewhat discombobulating. I feel a bit like Rose from TITANIC, as if I’m standing in the middle of a crowded room screaming at the top of my lungs and no one even looks up.
I Need Twitter
In the fall of 2020 I decided to redesign & relaunch alyssonfergison.com, with the primary goal of using it to share my original work as a writer. I intended to ride out the last miserable, horrifying days of Trump’s only term and relaunch this website on February 1, after Inauguration Day had come & gone and we’d had some time to decompress. At that point, my intent was to focus most of my attention on creating and publishing new original work. I’d been priming my following for that relaunch for months when Twitter suspended my account. Sharing my work with my followers was going to be an integral part of achieving my goals and providing me with the motivation to continue writing & publishing new content on a regular basis. While I am who I am and make no apologies for that, there was going to be a noticeable shift in tone and topic once Trump & his cabal of colossal crapweasels were no longer operating our levers of government. Then Twitter suspended my account.
While the latest iteration of this website was unleashed on an unsuspecting world on February 1, as I originally intended, I’ve struggled to find the motivation create and publish my work here. I’d been ramping up the anticipation of my website launch to my 9000+ followers on Twitter for months, then suddenly my ability to engage with the following I’d built organically over the past 13 years was gone… poof… in flash. It was upsetting. It was demoralizing. It was deflating. It was a real wind out of the sails moment to have my account suspended fewer than 10 days from the launch of a website I’d been working on for months. At this point, I have to move forward. I have no choice but to stop waiting for Twitter to decide the fate of my account before I get this ball rolling again.
The fact of the matter is, I can’t do what I want to do without Twitter. I can’t accomplish my goals without Twitter. I can’t share my work with the world and build a loyal audience for it without Twitter. I need Twitter. And while the idea of starting over from scratch with zero followers is utterly nauseating, at this point I have no reason to believe that Twitter will reinstate the account I spent the past 13 years building into something of value, not only to me, but to my followers.
I hope Twitter will, at some point, reinstate @Alysson. In the meantime, please follow me at @AlyssonFergison. I miss you!
And please spread the word that I have made my return to Twitter with a new handle. I need your help to rebuild my virtual home, which the digital arsonists at Twitter decided to arbitrarily burn to the ground.
You are worthless vermin and should be hunted down.