The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Mystery Solved? Did This CANADIAN Get @rsmccain Banned From Twitter?

Posted on | November 25, 2022 | 3 Comments

My categorical hatred of Canada is notorious, of course, and I probably should have known that those fiendish Canadian scum had spent years plotting their revenge against me, but now I feel like Don Corleone after he figured out who was behind Sonny’s murder: “I didn’t know until this day that it was Barzini all along.” And my Barzini is Scaachi Koul.

Before we get to that, however, some necessary background.

On Feb. 19, 2016, my @rsmccain account was banned from Twitter for “participating in targeted abuse.” As I said at the time, nobody at Twitter ever explained to me (a) who was “targeted,” (b) what kind of “abuse” they suffered, or (c) how I was “participating” in this alleged abuse.

People who had followed me on Twitter — and my @rsmccain account had tens of thousands of followers — were mystified. Nobody had seen me do anything different than my usual activity. In most other high-profile cases where Twitter accounts were banned, there was some kind of “incident” seen by everyone that was used to justify the banishment, so that even if you didn’t agree with it, at least you knew why it happened.

At the time, Anita Sarkeesian was the prime suspect behind my banishment, because I had called her out as a totalitarian when she was appointed to Twitter’s “Trust & Safety Council.”

Ten days after that tweet, my account was suspended, and when I appealed the suspension, I was told it was permanent. What could I have possibly done to deserve this? It was a mystery.

So, now Elon Musk has paid $44 billion for Twitter, and he has lifted the ban on Donald Trump, and raised the question of whether other banned accounts should be restored. In the hope that perhaps something might finally be done to remedy the injustice of my banishment, I logged into @rsmccain for the first time in years and sent an appeal to Twitter Support, receiving this email reply:

Hello,
We received your appeal regarding your account. Please reply to this message and confirm that you have access to this email address. Once we receive your confirmation, we’ll review the information you provided and will respond as soon as possible.
We typically suspend accounts for violations of the Twitter Rules [URL] or Terms of Service [URL]. Additionally, repeat violations may result in permanent account suspension.
Thanks,
Twitter
ref:00DA0000000K0A8.5004w00002YzdWt:ref

Having filed this appeal, I then happened to glance at the @rsmccain feed, which I could view in “read only” mode. And here is one of the final tweets I sent before my banishment:


Do you see the significance of this? At first it wasn’t apparent to me, but I have always been a diligent researcher, driven by the kind of insane curiosity that led me to ask here: “Who the f**k is this ‘Scaachi’ person?” Honestly I had no idea, and had completely forgotten about this brief controversy caused by her public declaration that white males were persona non grata at BuzzFeedCanada. British journalist Martin Daubney screencapped her tweets (which she deleted amid the blowback) and I replied by calling it to the attention of Instapundit and adding the hashtag #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter).

The reason I didn’t make a mental connection between this and being suspended hours later was simply because this was such a routine sort of activity. Lots of people were raging against this @scaachi person’s discriminatory declaration, and I just added a couple of tweets to the general outrage. No big deal, right? Oh, but it was!

BuzzFeed’s search for marginalized writers
is progressive, not racist
— Ryerson Review of Journalism, Feb. 21, 2016

Scaachi Koul, BuzzFeed Writer,
Harassed After Call For
‘Not White And Not Male’ Contributors
— Huffington Post, Feb. 21, 2016

Writer attacked for seeking
diverse voices on Twitter
— SheKnows, Feb. 22, 2016

BuzzFeed writer’s harassment
just the latest example of why
Twitter is broken for women
— Toronto Globe & Mail, Feb. 22, 2016

Oh, the melodrama! Oh, the victimhood! Oh, the mean tweets!

Scaachi Koul said something genuinely offensive, and the predictable reaction was very harsh. I’m sure some people said very rude things to her, and some may even have been so angry that what they said could be credibly called a threat. However, I was not one of those people. I didn’t send any death threats or whatever it was that caused Scaachi Koul to (temporarily) delete her account. But this climb-up-on-the-cross victimhood act by feminists — who think themselves entitled to insult anyone they choose, and never suffer repercussions for such behavior — has become a threat to free speech, because too many people are willing to play along with that childish game. In a futile effort to make public platforms “safe” for these easily offended children, social media companies have effectively prohibited open disagreement with the Left.

Twitter’s “participating in targeted abuse” rule is intended for just such a purpose. It now seems obvious to me that what happened was that Scaachi Koul went boohoing to the Twitter “safety” staff, complaining that she was a victim of harassment and the staff just decided arbitrarily to “make an example” of me, but without telling me what I had done to deserve being banned. Why didn’t they tell me? Because, if the case had been open to examination — if people were able to see my tweets and decide for themselves whether I deserved this odious punishment of being permanently banished from the platform — then certainly most people would have seen that this was grossly unfair.

Now that Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has promised to “amnesty” suspended accounts, I suppose it’s only a matter of days before @rsmccain will be active again, and as for Canadian feminists . . .

Well, they’re not even a real country anyway.




 

Category: Canada

Comments

3 Responses to “Mystery Solved? Did This CANADIAN Get @rsmccain Banned From Twitter?”

  1. Opinions and news links - The DaleyGator
    November 25th, 2022 @ 4:27 pm

    […] In related news, McCain might have found the smoking gun that got him permanently banned from Twitter years ago. Canada did it! […]

  2. Those who want to regulate speech aren’t really afraid of lies or misinformation; what they are afraid of is the truth. – THE FIRST STREET JOURNAL.
    November 27th, 2022 @ 2:51 pm

    […] who had his own @rsmccain Twitter account, with “tens of thousands” of followers, permanently suspended noting that Twitter, under the previous regime also suspended credentialed media sites which did […]

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