It’s official, my friends. We live in a technocracy -- and a really stupid one at that.
On the first of April, like a dumb April Fool’s joke, Twitter permanently suspended my account claiming I had violated their policy on impersonation.
In other words, according to Twitter, I had stolen my own identity and was guilty of impersonating myself. Because that’s totally logically possible. Very cool, Twitter!
You’d think they’d ask me to verify my identity before nuking my account, right? But no, they were so certain that I’m not me and can’t verify my own identity that they snapped their woke, trigger-happy little fingers and erased me from a major part of the internet.
As a well-established journalist who’s written thousands of articles for Maxim, NBC, Cosmopolitan, Dr. Oz, and a handful of other outlets, I’m extremely easy to verify. Not to mention the fact that I’ve had my account for ten years and had my personal email listed in my bio. But still, our Big Tech overlords insist they know my identity better than I do.
In fact, I’m apparently so good at impersonating Zeynep Yenisey that I hacked into her official website and linked it to her now-suspended Twitter page. Wow! Incredible!
It's really obvious that Twitter takes great pleasure in eliminating and punishing accounts that fall outside the realm of controlled opposition. And when they get called out on taking it too far and suspending accounts for really stupid reasons, they say it was an "accident" even though we all know it definitely isn't an accident.
Since my countless appeals to Twitter asking for my account back were all ignored and Twitter thinks I’m not Zeynep, I did what any logical person would do: Made a new account with the handle ThisIsNotZeynep.
I used a different IP address and drew a mustache on my profile picture to escape Twitter's A.I. and everything. Ah, the things we do to have a voice on the internet.
Lo and behold, Twitter didn’t like that either. Following another brief suspension for impersonation -- albeit this time temporary -- they did everything they could to censor me, including making it so that my followers couldn't see my tweets and gifting me every form of shadowban possible.
Does Jack Dorsey have a personal vendetta against me? Did he slide into my DMs asking me on a date and got really sad that I didn’t reply? WHAT IS GOING ON? It's not like I was problematic or anything.
Here’s my take on all of this: If I was suspended two or three years ago, I’d think Twitter’s A.I. crapped out and maybe actually made a mistake. However, I was conveniently banned days after one of my tweets that softly went against the tightly controlled narrative went viral and got the attention and follows of the likes of Dr. Sebastian Gorka, master CRT-destroyer James Lindsay, and Ian Miles Cheong, so it’s blindingly obvious that my suspension was entirely political.
I know that Jack Dorsey is a greasy loser who doesn’t own a beard trimmer and probably smells weird, but do the rest of the people who work at Twitter know how sick and authoritarian their platform is? I honestly doubt it. There's no question in my mind that their NPC engineers are mostly SJWs who think they’re promoting healthy conversation and protecting democracy by silencing the opposition. Because that isn’t tyrannical at all. Keep up the good work, guys.
And to all those still spewing the half-baked argument of “iT’s A pRiVaTe PlAtFoRm, ThEy CaN dO wHatEvEr ThEy WaNt,” I offer the following sentiment: You’re an idiot. Large social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are massive and control the flow of information around the world.
Giving a handful of aspiring tyrants the power to control, distort, and restrict what information is shared and the ability to eliminate access to the truth is oddly reminiscent of dictatorial regimes of the past, but with a modern, global twist. And that’s not good.
In conclusion, ZEYNEP WANT ACCOUNT BACK. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.