Tender Dick White Twitter Suspension
February 7, 2022
Dear Twitter Support,
I am writing, yet again, to appeal the suspension of both my accounts, @fuelgrannie and @QueensStomp, and I am sending this same exact, and very long, letter to you on behalf of both of these two accounts.
You were not only wrong in your decision to suspend my two accounts but also wrong in allowing your flawed reporting system to be used by other accounts to purposefully push me off of your platform for no good reason.
I am a real person: I’m not just some anonymous, food-stain-covered fanatic living in my parents’ basement and causing havoc out of boredom or loneliness. I am, rather, a food-stain-covered old, loud and real human, a real person, Connie Murray, who attends local meetings, speaks publicly often and is known for my relentless documentation and drilled down research.
My name is clearly displayed in both of my Twitter bios. I have two blogs. I am not just active online in social media and blogging but am also a nationally recognized housing advocate and critic of yimby (“yes in my backyard”) and Amazon who has been publicly speaking at New York City community board and other area meetings in Queens and Manhattan for years. My piece about NYC yimby group Open New York was featured in the New York Daily News article on the SoHo NoHo rezoning: Open Your Eyes to Open New York remains a definitive examination of this organization.
I am arguing not just for my name and content to be reinstated but I am also stumping for my very reputation to be restored. My suspension has spawned all sorts of unsubstantiated theories on my behavior, words and personal history which I have never displayed or which has never existed, neither on your site nor anywhere else. Because your platform is so prominent, people are using it to besmirch my in-real-life reputation which demands that you must play more of a role in the management of how you are allowing this to happen to me: this appeal letter will detail, in painstaking depth, how there is no good reason for either suspension or the banishment of my entire presence from your site. The reasons (save for one valid instance and for which I take complete responsibility) which you yourself had supplied to me are not violations of your Terms of Service (TOS) and I will go through each occasion to thusly demonstrate why.
Put on your seatbelt: this is a very long letter with a lot of evidence.
Long + lots of evidence = fuelgrannie.
You enacted this double suspension of my accounts on the morning of January 23, 2022 after I had posted what was so clearly a sarcastic tweet: the irony is not lost on anyone that one week later the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood herself, tweeted almost the exact same phrase which caused my suspension while addressing the exact same group who have been attacking and targeting me for years.
That group is yimby: aggressive, obnoxious neolib centrists who are mostly young, white, male tech professionals and push a harmful real estate agenda as they lobby for predatory and gratuitous housing policies. Both Atwood and I see the casual brutality of these players who attempt to intimidate older people out of their residences under the pretext that the older people are too wealthy, too selfish and too racist to be allowed to stay in their own homes. And yimby uses your platform vociferously to spread its agenda, more than it does on any other social media site.
Atwood’s tweets demonstrate that this isn’t just my own personal, overwrought response to yimby: the above linked articles describe yimby’s brutal and unreasonable culture from all over the country and rest of the world. My own takes about yimby include how communities need to protect elderly residents from yimby’s destructiveness and how New York City government is in on the yimby scam and protects the abusiveness of yimby.
Even yimbys themselves see how problematic their movement and engagement remain. They have always acted like bullies on your platform as they aim to overtake public discourse and have been using your platform to specifically target me since 2019. This current ban for me is the second suspension my accounts have endured directly because of yimby; the first suspension happened in October 2019.
And you already know this, Twitter, because the footprint of my activity is at your fingertips: you know how much I get reported and you also know how few of those reports are viable and cannot be used against me.
It is important to note upfront that there were no TOS violations against my QueensStomp account when you had determined to suspend it along with my fuelgrannie account: zero.
You had never sent me anything about the QueensStomp account until the morning of January 9, 2022, when I, all of a sudden, was not able to fully utilize my fuelgrannie account: you, Twitter, as an entity, had not yet indicated to me any block or suspension so I had wondered if the site was down.
I even Googled “Twitter down,” which remains in my internet search history, and after seeing no news of “Twitter down,” I went back into your app where there was still no indication whatsoever of any lock or suspension on the fuelgrannie account, which still nevertheless lacked full functionality, so I switched to my QueensStomp account just to see if I could access your site and you immediately suspended that account, simply because I had switched to it. Again, this is an account which had not received one violation from you. Ever.
It wasn’t until I accessed the QueensStomp account that I was informed of any suspension of either account. I then switched back to fuelgrannie and finally received a prompt telling me that account, my main account, had also been suspended.
You suspended QueensStomp for no good reason. You had never sent me anything about my conduct on that account and you must take that hard fact into account: there are 1385 tweets on QueensStomp which, as you know, I can still see; this suspension may grey my account to any and every other eye, but I can still see those tweets.
And so can you.
So you need to specifically show me which tweets out of those 1385 posts are hateful or abusive because tweeting “don’t forget to block me on this account, too” or “millionaire homeowners and tender dicks beware” isn’t abuse.
Please show me which QueensStomp tweets warrant any lock or suspension. Please show me how I was tag-teaming with my two accounts to be abusive to other users. You need to show me your own assessment of my own content and not solely rely on the whiny, dishonest efforts of yimby accounts who had reported my “alt” because they had strived to get all forms of me off of your platform.
In summary, the brief violation history of my smaller, less-used “alt” QueensStomp Twitter account involves zero violated TOS but was still nonetheless suspended along with my main fuelgrannie account for my having trying to access it.
That’s neither a good nor fair reason. That account did nothing to earn a suspension other than having been often reported by yimbys (the cited account, @les3025, which was created back in 2016, has only 7 followers at the writing of this appeal: that tiny group includes the prominent regional yimby voices of New York City real estate developer Ben Carlos Thypin and Philadelphia-based propagandist and chaos tweeter Taylor Austin Kessinger. Huh.)
Regarding my fuelgrannie account, for the sake of complete transparency and to lay out the history of my offenses, let’s go through all the violations for that username, one by one, starting with the very first one in June 2019.
I’ll be piecing together these violations using your own correspondence to me via email and also via my own memory and recollection as your email correspondence doesn’t fully document tweets involved or any resulting actions. You have a full record of these offenses, though: you have even more information on these offenses on your end.
That very first violation, which you sent me in June 2019, involved you locking my account for 12 hours for my having chided a white supremacist for wanting to form a white nation: that account reported me and I reported them yet I was the one who suffered the lock; this is the email you sent me at 5:40am on June 10, 2019.
Hello fuelgrannie: We’ve received your appeal request. Our support team will take a look at the information you provided for your appeal. We will respond via email as soon as possible. Please note that while we review your appeal, you’ll be unable to access your Twitter account. If you would prefer, you may instead choose to cancel your appeal request [by clicking this link] and resolve the violations by proceeding to Twitter and following the on-screen instructions to restore your account to full functionality. Thanks, Twitter
To the best of my memory, as it is not documented via any email correspondence, I had clicked the link to restore my account, but you have the full record of how that all went down.
In summary, my first offense was calling out a white supremacist account for wanting to form an all-white nation.
My next “offense,” in early October 2019, was my account being suspended in a targeted attack by NYC yimby group Open New York. Two days after receiving notification of my suspension, I sent you an appeal letter and you followed up with this email two days later:
Hello, We’re writing to let you know that we’ve unsuspended your account. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope to see you back on Twitter soon. A little background: we have systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk, and yours was flagged as spam by mistake. Please note that it may take an hour or so for your follower and following numbers to return to normal. If you need to get in touch with us again, please file a report through your Twitter app or our forms page, as this account isn’t monitored for replies. Thanks, Twitter
That “offense” resulted in my fuelgrannie account being the only account of mine suspended: I was active on QueensStomp and my fuelgrannie account was reinstated after four days.
So you are aware, I have read that other accounts, which had also been deliberately targeted as mine had been, also received the exact same email from you and none of us believe the “flagged as spam by mistake” excuse. We know that we were the subjects of attempts to suspend our accounts and your way of handling it has been to brush these attacks off as “glitches” instead of giving consequences to the accounts, likely 70 to 80 accounts, which had ganged up on us.
While bearing zero responsibility on how some of your users operate, you allow groups of accounts, including multi-managed accounts of same-user main and its alts, to thereby target and bully other accounts with no repercussions.
That breaks your own Terms of Service.
Instead of rightfully giving consequences to the 70 to 80 accounts committing the TOS-breaking dogpiling so to suspend other accounts, you instead hold the innocent target as guilty until proven innocent. You give no suspension or lock or notation or anything to the accounts acting in consort, only to their intended target.
Why do you do that?
You need to change how you handle these situations: this practice of making the victims of such ganging-ups to be the sole parties bearing the entire responsibility of these attacks literally breaks your own TOS: you yourself are breaking them and you’re allowing other accounts to break them, too. You need to brush up on all types of internet bullying: just because an account has a lot of reports against it doesn’t mean there are any worthy violations. Such reports may not truly reflect any abuse but rather may be an effort to silence the targeted account’s voice.
*cough*
So, I’m not going to count the suspension in October 2019 as any violation against me (and neither should you).
And even after my account had been reinstated, there was this constant notification that something was wrong with my account which lasted well over a year, which I had repeatedly reported to you for months, via an internal case appeal. Despite following the prompt to amend what may be wrong or inappropriate on my feed, I kept receiving the same vague message to limit “profanity in any form, including censored profanity; profanity in the Twitter bio; profanity in promoted content; excessive use of profanity in organic content,” which was odd because I don’t use profanity. It’s also odd because many of your users do use profanity regularly and their accounts are not suspended. You have literal porn on your site, literal videos of literal penises entering literal vaginas and literal anuses, but you’re telling me to watch the profanity which I have never used.
It got to the point in 2019 and 2020 where I just stopped responding to the prompt because I knew it was futile, no communication was coming from you, you didn’t want to help me resolve the issue and you, to this day, never supplied me with a reason for why I had that notification constantly on my account. I even made my account private and didn’t tweet anything for three months, from mid-November 2019 to mid-February 2020 because I remained so concerned with having my account taken away from me again.
So that’s the nutshell for my 2019 suspension and how wonky my account remained even after it was reinstated.
Getting back to the biography of my violations, the second one I received from you came just this past October 26, 2021, less than four months ago from the writing of this appeal and some 12 years into my usage of your platform: just two offenses earned in over a decade of tweeting.
My 10/26/2021 TOS violation was in response to this tweet (“Looking at your twitter, you have a weird obsession with this and a hatred towards Amazon”) in a thread originated by then Buffalo Mayoral hopeful India Walton and on the day it had been reported Walton had referred to a fellow meeting attendee as a “tender dick white man.”
My tweeted response, with intended quotation marks included: “looking at your twitter, you have a weird obsession with tender dick white men and a ~*hatred*~ towards amazon, wtf!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!😤🍼😩” which you had then oddly deemed as hateful content.
Hateful against whom? Against white men? Against overly sensitive white men? Against Amazon?
Is this a running theme?
Please tell me what is hateful about: “looking at your twitter, you have a weird obsession with tender dick white men and a ~*hatred*~ towards amazon, wtf.”
Please tell me. Because I don’t see it. Because it’s not there.
But you still used this against me.
And you’ll have to remind me how this all played out, as you had emailed me a link that afternoon to cancel my appeal: did I do that? I can’t remember: maybe you had also asked me to delete the tweet, but I do not recall and you never supplied me with a reference number for this incident.
In summary, my second offense resembles my first offense from all the way back in June 2019: it’s me criticizing white people. Was either tweet hate speech? Nope.
My third offense came the very next day, October 27, 2021, and for that instance I did deserve a violation.
After having received a dm about it, the record of which remains in my inbox and which you can access and verify on your end, I had hastily and carelessly tweeted out a screenshot of the purchase record of a multimillion dollar home belonging to a board member of NYC yimby group Open New York: I did not block out the address in that screenshot and thus doxed the homeowner.
What I did was thoughtless and potentially harmful to that party and I take full responsibility for my haste and carelessness. I’ve reported other instances of doxing in the past and remain in complete agreement of me suffering consequences for my actions with this one tweet. I mean no harm to that person and had been instead intending to make the cogent point about the hypocrisy attached to the fact that the million-dollar homeowners are not the ones opposing yimby but are, in fact, the yimbys themselves.
Had I taken the time to blur out the purchaser’s new address, there would have been no TOS violation. But I didn’t. I had acted too quickly and what I did was wrong, so a 12-hour lock was appropriate for such irresponsible behavior which did violate Twitter TOS.
And you and I both know that one incident is the only incident of me doxing any other account, despite the repeated false narrative that I dox frequently. I have never revealed anyone else’s address on your site and I learned a lesson when I committed that offense once, in thoughtless haste, this past October.
Meanwhile, my personal history is being bandied about as fair play which, irony of ironies, some see as a doxing of me. As had happened back in 2019 when I was accused of being a “billionaire’s niece,” I am once again being accused of being secretly wealthy and scamming the system by living in a stabilized rental.
So my third offense was doxing, a huge no-no. I agree with that violation and it was the sole of its sort of offense which I have ever committed on your site in almost 13 years of use.
My fourth violation, which came mere days later on Halloween 2021, was due to me calling an aggressive Trump supporter (with “Enemy of Leftism” proudly displayed in his bio) a “magat” four different times in the same conversation. You listed all four of my tweets together for this violation, as follows:
Tweet 1: “@bervamrojavi @FachtnaFathach @damienISgoodmon @48hills probably not, magat”
Tweet 2: “@bervamrojavi @FachtnaFathach @damienISgoodmon @48hills you’re a magat, magat cope”
Tweet 3: “@bervamrojavi @FachtnaFathach @damienISgoodmon @48hills you’re a magat: i know this because of your words and behavior if you’re hearing frequently that you are a magat from many other accounts, it isn’t because those people and i aren’t having ‘original thoughts:’ it’s because you’re a magat”
Tweet 4: “@bervamrojavi @FachtnaFathach @damienISgoodmon @48hills ok magat”
The account @bervamrojavi told me I was “worthless garbage,” “infantile, far left bottom-feeder” and to “go back to watching Lawrence Welk reruns” but I’m the one who got reported and blocked for what you determined to be four instances of “abuse and harassment” for responding back that they were a “magat.”
Yet it was @bervamrojavi who wouldn’t leave me alone: if anything, they were the alleged harasser here by pestering me yet I can’t even refer to what they were doing as either “abuse” or “harassment,” but rather as sea-lioning. They would not leave me alone but because I responded to them, I incurred the violation and lock.
Why?
“Ok magat” is now hate speech?! How is the word “magat” “abusive” or “harassing?”
It’s not.
And again, I wasn’t the one being harassed, I was merely responding to this account’s barrage. Should I have reported them? I saw no reason so I didn’t. They were being insulting and persistent but nothing which warranted reporting. You and I both know that I don’t report often. I report people for telling me to die or to kill myself or that I should be hit by a car or not wake up. But those are the only occasions I make reports.
Meanwhile I call someone a “magat” or a “white supremacist” or a “tender dick white man” and I get locked for abusiveness? When did racism against white people, especially white men become a thing?
It’s not.
Racism against white people doesn’t exist.
This article about yimbys showcases a photo of a bespectacled white guy with a red beard: unironically, many yimbys are bespectacled white guys with red beards. Being mad at me for noticing this screaming consistency doesn’t change the screamingly loud reality of this screaming consistency.
Observation isn’t “hate:” it’s observation.
Noticing that all these guys are similar isn’t “hate:” it’s observation.
Tweeting about how all these guys are similar isn’t “hate:” it’s observation. It’s analysis. It’s criticism.
Criticism isn’t “hate:” it’s criticism.
Yimbys are not trying to silence me because I am homophobic or abusive or racist: they are trying to silence me because I am effective at observing, analyzing, reporting and criticizing them.
They see that as “hatred” and “abuse” and they report my criticism of them as hateful content.
So, you, Twitter, need to better work on what is determined as “abuse” because none of what I wrote is.
My fifth and final offense, which resulted in the suspension of both my accounts, was my satirical tweet calling for my own death to an account which has now curiously and conveniently changed their user name from @Ya3il8200 to @ya3il82 but the conversation, where this account accuses me of being a weirdo nimby boomer who was “fingerblasted” in a parking lot after a 1957 prom, still exists.
I sarcastically called out their ageism. I got permanently suspended while they changed their username.
So, to sum up, those are all my offenses, all five of them, which led to the suspension of both my accounts.
These violations constitute the reasons why you had decided to kick me off of Twitter. Not for homophobia, not for violence, not for obscenity, not for racism against people of color: nope, not for any of those things.
I got kicked off for “magat” and “tender dick white man.”
And how come you didn’t give me that “are you sure you want to tweet that?” warning I have been recently reading about but, as you well know, never ever received myself because you have never ever used it on me. Why not?
I am evidently such an oft-reported account, yet I have never received that “want to review?” prompt from you: why is that?
Especially in that one tweet which resulted in the suspension of both my accounts: why didn’t you send me a warning? If I was using the word “kill” in a way that would have been seen as controversial, then why didn’t you offer me the opportunity to review my words?
There’s a theory that yimby-aligned employees at Twitter are part of the conspiracy to silence me: the fact that I never received that warning substantiates that theory. The fact that both my accounts were summarily shut down over the sarcasm of one account which used the same self-effacing sarcasm used by Margaret Atwood also raises suspicion.
Per your own correspondence: “Here’s a summary of what isn’t allowed on Twitter, according to our safety policies: Threatening violence against someone or a group of people; celebrating or praising violence; harassing someone or encouraging people to harass someone; wishing harm on someone; promoting violence, threatening, or harassing people because of their identity (like race or gender); promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm; images or videos that show sexual violence and assault; child sexual exploitation or threatening or promoting terrorism or violent extremism.”
So tell me: when did I ever do any of this?
On January 9, 2022, you had emailed me that because of covid, your review process may be slowed down yet a mere three days later you let me know both of my accounts were suspended, which was less time than the four days by which you had made your assessment in 2019. I don’t believe you fairly reviewed my account this time around and you need to.
My degree of notoriety involved my name trending for a few days and #freefuelgrannie continues to pop up as a hashtag, used by both sides.
Almost a month later, I remain suspended while there is not just one parody fuelgrannie account, there are presently three: gruelfannie, foolgrannie and fueigrannie.
You’ve allowed for these parodies of my account to happen: those accounts are protected by your standards of parody engagement while, I, the person being parodied, had been directed by you via email to prove my identity to you. I was asked to provide a copy of my government-issued ID and to thereby entrust you every step of the way to manage that personal information and all the risk which comes with such a correspondence while the accounts spoofing me are protected by your parody account exceptions and don’t have to do anything other than exist. You don’t ask them to send you their government-issued ID, you required that from me alone, not them. You allow them to exist on your platform but not me.
Why?
You don’t protect a user like me, who is under constant attack of being reported with the express intent of getting me suspended. The same group which did it three years ago are now doing it again.
And you let them.
They even talk about it, on your platform, publicly: “OK, so now how do we bait Todd Fine until he gets so mad he severely violates Twitter’s TOU?” and “What’s the alt? Let’s go report it en masse.”
This is literally what they did to me: they reported me on masse, they laughed about it publicly and you let them.
Where is my recourse or even my protection on your site? Where is the nuance in your assessment process where you are able to understand that a party is being bullied instead of just believing the bullies simply because there are more of them?
You allow these yimbys to use your site to silence others so to commandeer the narrative around real estate, land issues and housing. These yimbys are deliberate and strategic in their behavior. All I have on my side is the block button which hasn’t helped me much as these yimby users all have multiple accounts and report me constantly.
These multi-account users openly admit their behavior as if it were the most regular and common thing, even allegedly sharing these alts with other users. Quinn Mootz, the notoriously irate and clumsy former campaign manager for Sara Lind’s unsuccessful run for New York City Council, has a bunch of accounts she uses for such activity, including the parody fueIgrannie account. I recognize her voice and style at this point: she used her @throwawayikea to tell me not to wake up, kinda violatin them TOS of yours, Twitter, but, hey, who am I to criticize the people who have a half dozen accounts which they use to tell me to die.
Aaron Carr who founded his own nonprofit “start-up tenant watchdog agency” Housing Rights Initiative used your platform for six hours one night in January 2021 to slander me with a bunch of lies: you let this happen. This guy, with his broad following, made all these unsubstantiated claims about me being a “con,” a liar, a habitual tweet deleter and a racist. I kept asking him during those six hours to show evidence of what I had done, which he literally scoffed at. You allow this person to constantly spread misinformation and flat out lies on your platform, including that hours-long obvious attempt to smear me and my reputation by deliberately and dishonestly accusing me of things I have never done. He used the amplification of your platform to harass me and lie about me.
What are Aaron Carr’s consequences?
Why aren’t there any?
What do you do to help accounts like mine? I am reported almost every time I tweet. Is it your policy to take a mass of reports blindly and then just suspend the account they’re targeting? Because if that’s what you’re doing, then you are allowing your platform to be manipulated by people whose main intent is to take over the narrative and silence other people: “just keep reporting, eventually the dam will break.”
Just keep reporting, eventually the dam will break.
Huh.
You let this happen, Twitter: this is a call to dogpile for the sole purpose of eliminating another account. A clear violation of your own TOS. And you do nothing to stop or even manage it.
You have permitted other users to publicly call for the harassment of me with zero consequences.
Why?
You allow an account like mine to get bullied into silence on your site: your own flawed and inadequate reporting and assessing mechanisms allow for it.
What do you ever do to protect accounts like mine, who are under constant reporting? And why have those violations you’ve affixed to my account so mild? Where is the homophobia? Where is the racism? Where is the hateful conduct? Where is the call to violence? Where is the harassment?
Twitter counts in the cultural sphere: it is an important, perhaps the most relevant, platform for information, news, analysis and visibility and I remain a voice and person which yimby is dying to silence. You need to better comprehend the role I have played in the political and real estate landscape here in my beloved hometown of New York City in dealing with my suspension: you are complicit with a false narrative being allowed to fester, not just about real estate development and political corruption but also false narratives about me.
All the work and research I have executed and posted during the past 13 years is now hidden from public eye. My investigation of the trolls who had been paid to harass Assemblymember Emily Gallagher as she ran for office in 2020, a story for which I was interviewed and was covered by East and Creek and which I had blogged about on Medium, is now invisible.
My months-long exploration of Amazon’s short tenure in Long Island City with its aborted HQ2 initiative is now only visible to me.
My witnessing of the Department of City Planning’s Senior Counsel John Mangin admitting that the city of New York cannot guarantee that even one unit of affordable housing will be created by the SoHo NoHo rezoning isn’t available for public view.
My horror in watching DCP Senior Planner Sylvia Li laughingly mention displacement packages for rent-stabilized senior citizens who will lose their decades-long affordable housing during a likely illegal ULURP Zoom meeting is now, conveniently, no longer part of the public Twitter discourse of the contentious and gratuitous Lower Manhattan rezoning.
My reporting, as tweets, is also no longer accessible via my blog posts or any mentions of my blog post.
My work is lost: I don’t deserve to lose almost 13 years of content over “magat,” “tender dick white man” and “let’s kill all the old people especially the weirdos.”
And to add context to my defense, let’s go through some of the lies which have been told about me and the initiatives which I support and about which I could never follow up with you because these accounts blocked me and also because you have no mechanism or means for reporting lies.
This sour patch account, a real estate development agenda pusher at DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) who is also aligned with the ever-lying Aaron Carr, created an entire long thread based on a screenshot of one of my blog posts: she accused me of being a property owner who was buying and hoarding units in Lower Manhattan, a complete lie. I couldn’t respond or even report her as she had already blocked me when she had used your platform to spread lies about me.
Yet she later whined, “i have a GS-level brainworms troll who not only has me blocked, but i’ve blocked as well, and they QT me all the time. from an alt i guess?”
Not from “an alt,” AngrySadPants, but from an incognito tab: why pretend you don’t know about that capacity, Cousin Murray?
Also, weird flex that “QT,” or “quote tweeting,” is exactly what she had done to me: a huge, long lie about me, via a series of QTs. I am left to assume that she believes it’s okay when she does it, yet I am somehow in the wrong for daring to utter her sacred name; after all, the very first time I had ever dared to engage with her surly grew-up-on-4chan presence on your platform, she instructed me to “shut the fuck up.” Gee, Twitter, I thought you guys hated profanity. Instead of directly engaging with me, she then grumbled to her followers about her having “had it up to here with peace of shit ‘muh sunlight’ nimbys istg,” again using profanity in reference to me. Using that screenshot from my blog, she proceeded to call for me to “GO SET UP CAMP IN A FIELD” perhaps because she feels it is her place to tell people where to live, ironically mirroring what she had accused me of doing.
After I replied to each one of her lies about me in my own response thread, via QTs because she had blocked me, she went private because she couldn’t handle the visibility of her own actions and then whined about someone else being a baby.
She also instructs other users not to engage with me on “her” threads, aka, some Thetan level 10 tender dick white man energy.
Many lies about me involve an imaginary and completely unsubstantiated hatred I apparently harbor towards gay men, created and circulated because I suspect these men, whether gay, straight or whatevs, cannot handle any criticism or scrutiny so they declare it must be my vague, undefined, general and broad “hatred of gays” which propels me and not my hatred for the lies told by toxic male yimby.
This guy claimed I called him “gay” and “spammed eggplant emoji” which you and I both know is a lie. I only had two conversations with that guy before he blocked me: this one and this one. No “gay.” No eggplant emoji. Just another yimby having a meltdown over having interacted with me and then lying about that interaction, confirming, as ever and always, why I use the baby bottle emoji to describe this fragile, dishonest mayonnaise crew.
How come you don’t better manage the lies which are promoted on your platform? Why do you believe these guys over me? Here I am, sending you yet another long document so to construct, piece by piece and bit by bit, how these guys lie but you don’t even have a reporting mechanism for lies, only for abusive behavior. Does that mean you tolerate lying or you just don’t know how to implement oversight over the false things which are shared on your site?
Why can’t you, as a content-sharing platform, do a better job in protecting the truth?
Part of my client-facing work involves the use of social media. My clients are aware of this suspension because I have had to let them know as their breadth becomes limited by my suspension, too: this isn’t happening in a vacuum, I have a life, I am a real person, I work. If I create an account to use for one these clients, you will shut it down or if I log into a client’s account from my IP address, you will suspend that client’s account: that is place you have placed both me and these businesses. Over the word “magat.” Over the phrase “tender dick white man.” Over the same self-effacing irony employed by the writer of The Handmaid’s Tale.
You need to change this.
Show me where I have been racist. Show me where I have been homophobic. Drawing attention to a group of aggressive white men is criticism, not racism, homophobia, violence, hatefulness or abusiveness. These guys can dish it out but then collapse in a fit of tears when they get an ounce back of what they continually vomit up.
And you allow it to happen.
These guys are mad at me for successfully standing up to them, for holding up a mirror to their overdramatic, chaos-creating, dishonest content and for breaking down every one of their lies: that’s why they report me, over and over again, with some accounts reporting me for every tweet I post: “I think her suspension resulted in every reporter getting a notification.”
I have been sent screenshots to my dms of discussions held via off-Twitter platforms where yimbys discuss “going after” other accounts. You know this: because those screenshots are in the direct message inbox of my Twitter account. Go look at them: you can see them better than I can at this point. The proof of this behavior has been documented through your very own platform.
And you allowed this to happen to me with no recourse, no nuance and this lazy assumption that the people who cannot stop reporting me for things (which you yourself never end up determining as violations) must be right because there are so many of them and just one of me.
So where does your responsibility lie in better managing your own understanding of a targeted attack? Surely you fathom that it’s possible that the person who is being reported is, in fact, not guilty of what their dogpiling is accusing them of and that in truth it’s the dogpiling pack who is breaking your own terms of service, which is what I brought up in my appeal.
I have been called deranged for years: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and also here, too. Let’s not forget insane, also here. And crazy, here, also unhinged. Immoral was an early accusation I received often. Also actual psychotic. Can’t forget lunatic: here, here, here and here.
I couldn’t report those tweets: they’re insults and lies but they don’t break your terms of service; as well, many were tweeted by accounts who had blocked me. You create no method for reporting tweets where the user is blocked. And my defenses against such accusations are no longer visible: so you, as the very medium for the content, are adding to this false narrative about me.
I don’t mind those insults (bring it on, Red!) but I do mind being deprived my own voice to stand up to them. If you are going to let those voices fester and grow in their dishonest claims, then you ought to allow accounts like mine to be able to speak out against them. You ought to allow for true fairness, not a bullying campaign to silence people who dare to call out that very bullying, that very hijacking of the narrative and all the lies which come with that.
Criticism isn’t hateful content: it’s criticism.
Criticism is also not abuse or violence: it’s criticism.
My blog about my Atwood synergy documents the constant theme of ageism, going as far to be peppered with mocking references to bombing neighborhoods and comparing elderly people fighting to stay in their homes to the Ku Klux Klan. (Interesting how Harvard Business School student Sam Deutsch has recently changed his handle: I wonder why he would do that, huh. Seems to be a recent trend with many yimbys. Hmmm.) Responses to Atwood’s sarcastic tweet included snippy demands that she depart her residence, blame her for the state of the world in general, and call her a “selfish oldie” for daring to remain in her long-term housing.
You allow for this type of engagement to occur while you suspend me for calling it out.
Infamous Sam Deutsch, a former intern for US senator Brian Schatz and current student at Harvard Business School, literally slanders people and uses their faces but I’m the one who loses both my accounts. Ben Carlos Thypin, who founded Open New York, jokes about bombing the homes of elderly New Yorkers over and over and over again but I’m the one who gets suspended.
Freddie DeBoer recently wrote “YIMBYs Could Solve the Affordable Housing Crisis, if They Weren’t So Busy Being Trolls (LOG OFF, BROS)” making me wonder why I am being suspended for trolling back. DeBoer writes:
“The social culture of online YIMBYism is antagonistic to the movement’s goals, in a way that’s become a common feature of politics in the internet era. A 2017 piece in The Guardian reflected this dynamic, emphasizing YIMBYs’ bouts of anger and refusal to compromise. I have personally found that, too often, the loudest YIMBY voices online are flippant, disrespectful, and far too quick to accuse their NIMBY opponents of bad faith, or of being shills for the wealthy. Several people I know who identify with the YIMBY label privately concede it’s a problem…. this tendency to revert to mockery is unhelpful.”
“Privately concede,” not publicly stated because daring to go against the cemented false yimby narrative would result in a dogpile reprimand by one’s peers: yimbys refuse to take responsibility for their optics so any criticism, especially from an internal source, is consistently met with cries of “No!!! Absolutely not!!!! That’s not us, stop it!!!” But also, curiously enough, a “defense… by just being rude and combative in return” which again begs me to ask, if yimbys are allowed to be rude, then I should be, too.
If California Yimby’s Darrell Owens is endorsing the “sending [of] a dunk tweet, [because] that’s what moves the needle,” then such action should be permitted for the other side, too, shouldn’t it? Why is there no two-way street?
For thee not for me in action, amirite?
Yimby are “all the same” to me, too: it’s okay for yimby to say that but not for me? Why? Where’s the logic in that? Or is hypocrisy the point? You need to manage this better, Twitter. They’re your users and you own this content.
And where the heck are all those screenshots of my alleged hateful content?
Penelope Katsaris, whose multiple accounts I have blogged about in two separate blog posts, tweeted she had “screenshots” but yet didn’t post any screenshots.
Aaron Carr, who runs his own nonprofit Housing Rights Initiative, also claims to have screenshots which he oddly never shares.
K, Aaron.
Um, maybe post ’em, cowboy.
Don’t you understand, Twitter, that you are allowing for these false claims to be used against me? This is your platform. Where is the alleged evidence these people claim to have and why are you permitting them to use your site to make vague, unsubstantiated claims about me especially when I can’t defend myself?
Why are you allowing this to happen?
Curious, too, that immediately before my account was suspended, I had been engaging with Hayden Clarkin, who had been whining about how difficult his life was as he was being forced to move out of his LIC luxury rental now that his covid rent reduction deal was expiring and he could no longer comfortably afford to reside in an empty glass tower. When I pointed out he had an online 25-page portfolio and, via his own posted resume, that he was CEO and Founder of his own organization TransitCon, he had sobbed to me that he was only a “part-time CEO” while claiming extreme poverty.
The conversation ended well, however, with him inviting me to chat over a cup of coffee, yet as soon as my account was suspended, he readily and quickly deleted all of his tweets with me, as you can see here, which struck me as very odd, as if he didn’t want any footprint or record of that particular conversation and activity with me at that particular time.
I found it especially strange, while conveniently coincidental, that he would delete tweets so quickly and so early in the morning. Don’t you? Were people connected to him, like all those anonymous yimby accounts with the anime profile pics, connected to reporting me that morning? You would have a record of that.
And these accounts, alts and mains alike, readily and publicly admit to repeatedly reporting me: “Maybe @fuelgrannie should stop engaging in the very tactics that she accuses YIMBYs of using? Sarcastic Tweet aside, she crossed the line myriad times in the past, including for multiple off-the-rails Tweets I reported a while back (and I’m not someone who reports people often);” “I was speculating that I might’ve contributed to this, but I have confirmation now. I present to you the broomstick of the Wicked Granny of the West;” “i’m thinking when they banned her they sent these out to anyone who reported her recently to make them feel like twitter is doing something;” and “as a coda to fuelgrannie day, twitter decided to let me know last night that they finally looked into my complaint. filed this months ago when she was locked out of her main for doxxing someone and continued to harass on her alt.”
“Fuelgrannie day.”
Huh.
This yimby falsely asserts “I’m just assuming all nimby accounts are her alts.” Yet you and I both know that’s not even close to the truth and yet remains so dismissive of the criticism these accounts rightly deserve: it is absolutely not just me who calls them out.
My username is often distorted in tweets because, as one does with Candyman, my correct moniker must never be uttered.
And I am not the only target of yimbys. This account, in Vancouver, British Columbia has been under similar attack as I have been: “The YIMBY have been carrying out a years’ long campaign of harassment and intimidation against me. At the same time, they’ve been carrying out a coordinated campaign to get me booted off twitter. You can’t make this up” and “I just want to let you know that @airigidir has a been running a years long campaign of insults and harassment against me, including calling me less desirable than a dog.”
My voice and work have been able to confirm to other communities and cities, even in other countries, that their hardship in dealing with abusive dishonest yimby isn’t because of their own “craziness,” but because yimbys are bad faith liars whose behavior goes complete unchecked on your platform, while you, in turn, allow those bad faith yimbys to silence me.
Do you understand how bullied I and others have been on your platform? And can you appreciate how little I whine about it and that I stand up for myself? I have handled all of this by myself, too: I have never “sent minions” to attack other accounts either on a public tweet or a private dm, ever. And you know this is true because my account’s public and direct message history. You know I fight alone and that I make zero accusations without receipts.
I don’t whine and threaten-tweet, “I have a screenshot!!!!!!😤🍼😩” which I then never post: I simply post the screenshot. Or the linked tweet. Or the QT.
I bring actual receipts instead of claiming to have things I never share yet use as solid irrefutable evidence.
I, Connie Murray aka fuelgrannie, always come with a receipt.
And you know this.
I have been using your platform since 2009: I bring evidence.
I have been dm-ed evidence.
I am trusted by so many people because of the amount of information I receive and because of how consistent and honest I am.
If you don’t know that about me as you suspend both of my accounts and ban me from your site, then you need to research better.
I belong back on your platform, not just because I was unfairly booted off by both you and yimby, but because my voice deserves to stay heard. All my content deserves to remain intact and public. As I had argued back in my 2019 Twitter suspension appeal, you may own my content but I created it so I have ownership to it as well and there is zero reason it should not be public. My content is valuable research: it outed political trolls, it documented the lies of city officials and it consistently acted as a reporter and witness at New York City events and area meetings.
I want you, Twitter, to take responsibility for how you are complicit with my reputation being slandered on your platform. If I am so guilty of all these things of which I have been accused, then where is the evidence?
Where is one piece of evidence?
Because a single, dusty, tired screenshot regularly shared by Aaron Carr of a tweet for which I had apologized directly to Mr. Carr (prompting him to block me via his own account and the account of the nonprofit he founded and runs, Housing Rights Initiative) isn’t evidence of racism, violence, hateful content or even homophobia. My tweet was shady and rude as commentary on how similar yimby all are, but it wasn’t homophobic. And in the recent light on Freddie DeBoer’s criticism of yimbys inciting their vociferously defense of their own right to be rude, then why doesn’t that apply to me, too?
How hypocritical, lazy and cowardly of yimby to not allow all sides to be heard. And how wrong of you to be complicit and let them.
If you have a yimby bias in your assessment process, you need to amend that. Again, I did not get suspended for the imaginary bigotry, homophobia, hatefulness, violence-inducing and racism that nobody, including you, can ever seem to substantiate: I got suspended for “tender dick white man,” “magat,” and “let’s kill all the old people especially the weirdos.”
Aka, I shouldn’t have been suspended and I never did any of the things of which I have been accused because there’d be some evidence of it.
There’d be some trace of me doing such behavior.
Wouldn’t there?
Where is it?
By removing me from the public discourse, you allow more propaganda to go unchecked, you permit the very people who had striven to silence me to continue to lie about me with no management or oversight by you.
Have you even followed up on the other accounts reaching out to you to reconsider your thoughtless decision? Why is communicating with you like a black hole?
It’s fair to contest a bad decision. It has been fair game for me all along to call these guys, especially how for they behave and I did that all by myself with no calls to anyone else to gang up with me on any account.
I just took to the business of talking, of tweeting, of arguing against, of bringing research and information and of standing up for myself.
I am their worst enemy because I stand up for myself as well as I do. That’s why they wanted me off your platform, not because of the imaginary bigotry. They want me off your platform because I do such a good job in showing how wrong they are, how cultish they are, how abusive and off putting they can be and of course how very similar they all are, not just in how they look (the architype bespectacled white guy with a red beard)
It’s fair to expect better from you in your assessment process: you’re kicking off a prominent voice in the New York City real estate development discussion for tweeting “tender dick white man,” “magat” and that castrating and dreaded baby bottle emoji.
And #freefuelgrannie continues to trend: TurboVax, aka Huge Ma, announced his dropping out of his bid for a Queens Assembly seat and then joked, “I’m going to bring fuelgrannie back to Twitter.” I blogged my response that I don’t need his imaginary “help” as I am likely more politically significant in Western Queens than he will ever be.
This appeal letter is so long because you didn’t do your job at all so I was left to do it for you. Because there is such a long history of people trying to get me kicked off your platform *cough*.
The crafting of this appeal has been a grueling process: I am fighting as I had in 2019, not just for my name and my content, but for my very reputation.
This isn’t a mea culpa: this is a you-a culpa. I didn’t do anything wrong: you allowed your platform to be used against me and my reputation, which is wrong.
I’ll be posting a version of this letter on my blogs and other social media platforms so this appeal can be public and not just sent down that silent black hole I always encounter when dealing with you; more eyes should be on this issue. If need be, especially since I can still see my account, I’ll post the history of my account via screenshots to continue to raise awareness about your lack of judgment here. Let’s show the whole world my account again. Let’s help people find all those screenshots, especially Aaron Carr. Let’s document all those claims about my alleged racism and homophobia and violence and hateful content. Let’s allow that baby bottle emoji to flap proudly and loudly in the wind.
You owe me as a publicly active person a much better assessment and much more fair call on what you have allowed to happen to me. Per your very own Terms of Service, you need to unsuspend both my accounts and restore all respective content. I did nothing to warrant any suspension of either account.
Do the right thing: #freefuelgrannie.
