A few days ago, while fooling around with the endless boilerplate screens Twitter provided purporting to address my big problem — my account was blocked — I somehow wandered into creating a new account.
And I did. Good heavens. There I was, back on Twitter, even if the I who was back on Twitter was a somewhat differently captioned I than the previous one and with a slightly different photograph. (The last one was the Daily News’ great front page on November 9, 2016, which pictured the White House over which was plastered an upside down American flag and in huge letters ‘HOUSE OF HORRORS.’ I am having it ⇓ framed.)
I didn’t gloat about being back on Twitter, no. I typed carefully, I rebuilt my “following” contingent, I scrolled down reading and laying in little comments and life was–
They blocked me again!
So now I have two Twitter accounts blocked. Although it’s fairly default to blame Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s maestro, for doing this, I came to the conclusion it isn’t Twitter doing the dirty on me. I sense another outside malignity laying itself, in effect, on top of my Twitter accounts and smothering everything.
All right. I’m doing what I can. In the meantime, though, I spend what used to be my Twitter time getting into the New York Times. Just now, I found a story about the New York Post and YouTube which drew my curiosity.
The New York Post was a terrific local tabloid once upon a time. Now, however, it is Rupert Murdoch’s house rag. Generally, any story printed in the Post should be treated with heightened suspicion.
Apparently, Twitter just did with the Post article on (OMG still???) Hunter Biden what I always do with the Post: blocked the story.
The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to subpoena Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, to testify on Oct. 23 regarding the company’s decision to block the article. Mr. Dorsey, along with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sundar Pichai of Google, are also scheduled to testify on Oct. 28 about Section 230, the law that shields technology companies from being held liable for some of the content published by its users.
While the number of views on the New York Post video remain subdued, videos related to the article have done extremely well. A Fox Business interview with Stephen K. Bannon, a former White House adviser who played a role in the article, got more than 275,000 views. An interview on Fox News with Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, about getting locked out of her Twitter account after sharing the Post story garnered 795,000 views.
So, Twitter has locked out a New York Post article as well as the accounts of White House employees. I have no problem there.
But for many, many many reasons, I am not on the same level as Kayleigh McEnany. I’ll leave it to you to place us on appropriate levels.