On Getting Kicked Off of Platforms

I’ve seen it happen too often

Most writers live with a constant sense of terror. Earnings always fluctuate. Opportunities dry up. Robots come along and steal all the great writing gigs. The list goes on and on.

Among those concerns is the fact that writers never control the distribution mechanism. It’s not easy to get your words in front of the eyes of other people. Even if you control a large email list, you rely on some mechanism to send out those emails. Most free email accounts only let you send 500 emails per day (I had to look that up).

I suppose you could sign up for a dozen free accounts, but the platforms that run email aren’t stupid. They’d probably figure out what you’re doing and shut you down. I suppose you could do the work to learn how to set up your own email distribution service, but that requires time and money.

The point is, the majority of writers are highly dependent on some platform or another to get the word out. Most of the time, this isn’t going to be an issue. The only thing that’s going to get you kicked off of a platform is egregious behavior.

This is part of the reason why editing is so important. You don’t want to inadvertently say something that gets you banned. A simple typo has the potential to be absolutely devastating. I write on social justice issues often, and there are various concepts I frequently denounce. However, even through the act of denouncing these concepts, those words and phrases appear in your work. AI could potentially see them and flag my articles.

There are a lot of irresponsible people who denounce the idea of “censorship” in any form, but that is absolutely ridiculous. Almost every platform posts a code of conduct that lists the kind of common sense items you aren’t allowed to post. For example, you can’t post threats against other people because that’s illegal. Everybody agrees with this, but that doesn’t mean it’s not censorship. It is censorship, it’s just that it’s good censorship.

The waters get murky when people want to set examples off to the side and not consider them. “Well, that’s something different!” They have to say this because it undermines their ridiculous position that censorship in all its forms is bad when that’s clearly not the case.

You can’t incite violence. You can’t give away government secrets. There’s a pretty long list of what we all agree constitutes appropriate censorship. But all of that is outside the conversation because the people directing the conversation are often dishonest (but that’s a discussion for another day).

The point is, all writers agree to hold themselves to a certain standard when they use a platform. Again, most of the time this is not an issue because the kind of stuff that’s prohibited falls into the realm of common sense.

Still, over the years I’ve seen various examples of writers getting banned from platforms. I’m not going to go into specifics because I don’t know the details, but it always makes me sad. I don’t like seeing writers I follow get banned (I don’t follow racists and I don’ follow violent people). Most of the time, I’m left with a lot of questions.

I do often make use of the block/report feature on various platforms myself. These days you kind of have to because there is so much AI out there. For example, whenever I get a private message from a scantily clad young woman, I instantly block/report.

I also receive a lot of comments that are clearly not of human origin. I block/report those too. We constantly have to weed the online garden of frauds. But when somebody I know to be human gets yanked, it troubles me.

The big thing you have to remember in order to avoid this fate is to always write with a clear head. Often, we discuss the vague “dangers” of too much screen time without getting into the details. Yes, it messes up your eyes to be staring at screens all day. Yes, it gives you a headache. Yes, it makes you depressed.

But there’s another danger in carrying an interface around in your pocket that’s capable of posting a message the whole world can see.

When I was growing up, there was a clear boundary between “work mentality” and “leisure mentality.” When you got dressed and went to school or the office, a flip was switched in your brain that controlled how you would behave. Your “professional” behavior was what counted. When you got done with work, you could head home and let your hair down and relax knowing that your actions weren’t going to count against you.

Today, the boundary between work and leisure doesn’t exist anymore. For better or for worse, you are now held accountable 24 hours a day.

Obviously, there is some behavior that’s unacceptable whether it’s work or leisure. Violent people and racists need to be held accountable when their masks slip and their true personalities are revealed. However, if you look at American society it’s sadly apparent that the violent racists aren’t generally the most vulnerable to platform removal. Those messages are everywhere.

What I see happen is that people get themselves into trouble by going online when they really need some down time. For example, imagine somebody crashes into your car. You don’t necessarily want a recording of the things you think or say in the immediate aftermath of getting into a crash. You run hot for a moment, then you settle down and get used to your new reality. That moment of running hot isn’t the real “you.” But if you are carrying around an interface that allows you to send a message to the world, you run the risk of making a permanent recording of your rage.

It’s not a good idea.

Sometimes I feel like social media was designed to get us all into trouble. You see people get into arguments on comment threads that spiral out of control. Nobody reads a comment thread that’s 200 messages long. That’s an embarrassment. Yet people still participate in those kind of recorded fights.

I’ve come to suspect that many of those antagonistic accounts that people get into fights with online aren’t even human anyway. They deliberately incite you into hostility to provoke you into saying something that can be reported. Don’t waste your energy engaging in that type of thing.

Really, the only protection that you have is to be mindful of your mental state and never rage post anything. When it comes to comments on articles or book reviews, always post “thank you.” Don’t hand over the keys to your brain to some nefarious entity.

It always makes me sad to see accounts that I know belong to real people get removed from a platform. We live in a society where individuals who promote racism or who incite violence are allowed to speak to their heart’s content. I approve of the idea of kicking racist or violent people off platforms. That doesn’t happen nearly enough.

As always, people who champion a message of decency have to hold themselves to a higher standard. You don’t want to get into a position where a platform is evaluating your account. Please be mindful of your mental state and only post when you have a clear head. Also, be aware that there are entities on the internet that will try to deliberately provoke you into using the kind of language that can get you banned.

I wish there were more protections, but the truth is that our society still needs to do a lot of work on itself. Like it or not, this is the task that has fallen to us.