If you have any sort of online footprint, you get a lot of garbage emails. If you run a popular blog, you get about ten times the amount of garbage email. You also get a separate mountain of great emails, so you have to sift through them for the good stuff. Imagine my surprise when I got this from Truth Social.
Your account has been banned for violating our Terms of Service. Indefinite bans are a rare and severe sanction, and are generally reserved for the most egregious violations of our Terms of Service. If you feel our decision to ban your account was unjust, immoral, or downright wrong, we encourage you to submit an appeal. Please send an email to contact@truthsocial.com. In the subject line, please write “@Appeal,” along with your username. Our team will review your ban appeal at our earliest convenience. After careful review, we will reverse or uphold the ban.
My first thought was that it was some sort of scam to get me to click on something. You see a lot of those. I see a lot of those. As an example, I can’t tell you how many times my Amazon account has been “suspended.” Never, actually, but they keep trying. So, here I am thinking, yeah. Right. Banned. From Truth Social. Facebook has never banned me. They throttled our content over a straw man argument made by a fake fact checker but never an outright ban. I may have been sent to Facebook Jail once, but I might be thinking of someone else. I’ve gone weeks without using it, so, maybe.
As for Truth Social, It can’t be. I don’t post anything that would qualify as,
- Illegal activity and behavior: content that depicts illegal or criminal acts
- Fraud: content that contains misrepresentations about a business or its goods and services or impersonates another person or business
- Nudity: sexually explicit or nude content or pornography
- Violence: content that depicts violence or threat of violence
- Underage content; sexually explicit content involving underage children
- Prostitution – solicitation or advertising for illegal sexual activity or sex for hire
- Counterfeit or illegal sale of goods or services – sale of merchandise or services that are counterfeit, not authentic or are fake goods
- Privacy violations – violate or post content that violates a person’s privacy rights
- Illegal sale of good and services – sale of or promotion of illegal drugs or services
- Intellectual Property – posting or infringing on intellectual property rights without authorization
- Doxxing – sharing or threatening to share the private information of an individual without their consent or breach of privacy rights of others.
So, I try to log into the account, and “What do you know!” I’m banned.
The great thing about these new social media platforms that rose up in response to the incontinent toddlers running sites like Facebook is I’m being sarcastic. The ban tells me nothing about why I was banned. That appears to be a thing. We banned you. Guess why?
Excellent, just like dating in High School. Dude 1: What’s wrong with her? Dude 2: I have no idea. Dude 1: Did you ask her? Dude 2: Yeah, that just made it worse.
Unlike dating in high school Truth Social did say I should appeal, which I did, but without knowing exactly what the issue was, the request was more of a “For what was I banned? Please forgive me, and how do I make it end” (which is a lot like dating in High School).
For the record, most of the ‘Grok social sharing is done by our comment moderator, whom I reimburse with a paltry stipend (it’s hard to find people to do that for free), but I update my personal Gab, Twitter, and Truth Social, just not that often. As such, the lack of new content made it easy to work out what got the algorithm’s panties in a bunch.
I think they think I was suggesting we off poor people. Um, no, Not at all. I don’t even wish death on Liberals. Life is quite literally sacred and should only be taken in defense of life if even that cannot be avoided ( and yes, I’m still fuzzy on Capitol Punishment which I still support for reasons explained elsewhere).
Having identified the not at all offending content, I sent a second email.
Good day,
As a follow-up to my challenge to being banned, it appears to be the last post I shared on Truth Social. The title is “Progressive Trial Balloon: Ethicists Suggest Making it Legal to Euthanize the Poor.”
This piece is a criticism of the Left’s assisted suicide movement and the slippery slope leading to recent suggestions by progressive ethicists in Canada.
At no point do I condone euthanizing anyone; quite the opposite.
Please review the content and, if possible, remove the ban on my account.
While I expect a human to look and discover that the ban was unnecessary and they will unban my account, I am getting the same itch I got when Parlor banned me briefly for no good reason. The scratching sounds to relieve the itch rhymes with” go to hell.” As in, what the heck do I need you for exactly? Truth Social doesn’t drive much traffic to GraniteGrok.
That works both ways, of course. I’m not using the platform aggressively enough to drive a lot of interaction there, so my being gone would go almost entirely unnoticed, but look, I took the opportunity to have some fun with it. And I am, for the record, having fun. And I got a post out of it, so that’s a win.
I’ll let you know if they unban me or if my days on Truth Social have ended. Although, I might not. It’s not that big a deal, and absent some unexpected and totally undeserving mea culpa from them, what exactly do I write?
Update: As of this morning, my account has been unblocked, unbanned, and is once again a fully operation (itty bitty, teeny tiny) social media battle station … or something. The discovery was the result of a random log-in attempt, I was not notified of my return to good standing.