A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

For example many football club-related groups are private for obvious reasons, and, as such, getting kicked out of FB also means getting kicked out of your local supporters' forum where the online discussions happen. Yes, people from that group also meet irl, but not all of them attend those meetings and those meetings happen, at most, once every week (after the football season starts). For example we're out-season now but this is also the time of some of the most heated and interesting discussions, because right now we're in the middle of the transfer season.

I knew a guy who was having serious financial trouble, and couldn’t afford to keep a phone line active. He relied on Facebook to stay in contact with his wife and son because he at least had access to WiFi.

You can make a similar argument about phones. People can just reach each other via mail, or physically visit each other…but this doesn’t exactly constitute a healthy state of interaction.

Use email you say! Almost every big email provider requires verification via phone or another email address these days.

It’s legitimately getting harder and harder to communicate in these other ways.

> Who only communicates with colleagues over Twitter?

I don’t use Twitter much these days, but for a period of time, it was by far the easiest way to get/stay in touch with the communities I was organizing. I did dev advocacy, and if I ran a meet up somewhere, I didn’t want to just hand my phone number to a room full of people, but did want the option to stay in contact.

Could I have found another solution? Yeah sure. But at the time, this seems pretty reasonable, and Twitter wasn’t yet banning people for inane things.

If I lost that account now, it’d sever an entire community. Could I work around that? Sure.

But downplaying the significance of these things seems short sighted.

I rarely touch social media these days for many other reasons, but that is definitely an isolating choice to make in 2022.

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