How Twitter Uses Psychological Warfare To Destroy YOUR Art

and what YOU can do to prevent it!

Twitter’s trying to crush my spirits.

For those of you who don’t know much about Twitter violation metaphysics, here’s what happens when you have a tweet flagged: you open the app and find suddenly all the cool buttons and notifications have been replaced with this.

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Note the non-standard way they display your tweet here. The picture isn’t visible and the formatting’s all screwed up. I halfway think they do this to make you look less funny if you try and screenshot this to share on another social media, but maybe I’m paranoid.

From this screen, the only things you can do are either delete the tweet or appeal it. Deleting lets you back instantly, but if you appeal then you’ve gotta wait for their response to do anything on the app. It’s clear they’re banking on you being so addicted to their app you just delete the thing and save their moderation team the trouble, but they miscalculated - I’m not addicted to Twitter at all. What I am addicted to is God and Jesus and standing up for what I believe in. So on December 3rd, I clicked appeal.

When you do that it sends you to a form that I unfortunately forgot to screenshot, but there’s a box for you to enter 160 characters explaining yourself. This was another really tricky move by them - They spent years training me to write in 280 character chunks of text only to provide me 160 on my appeal. I was at a severe handicap, especially with the amount of context I needed to provide a random Twitter moderator who likely hadn’t heard the Kanye interview I was paraphrasing. I tried several drafts but I kept running out of characters. Eventually I gave up and sent it to my lawyer to finish. He replied back with his draft in 3 minutes before calling.

“Lukas, aren’t you Jewish?”

“In what way?”

“Like, you’re Jewish. Aren’t you a Jewish person?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never been tested. Why?”

“I just assumed, with your nose. You’ve really got a nose on you.”

“Oh yeah, she breathes real good. Why so curious though?”

“I think there’s a high chance it’d make your appeal go smoother if you let them know you’re Jewish.”

I decided against that route. He billed me $100 and I sent it off.

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After you click submit it takes you here, which is sort of like purgatory. You’re stuck there waiting until something happens. There’s no indication of how close your appeal is to the top of the list or how long it might take. They tease you, too - “If you’d rather just delete the content, you can cancel your appeal.” Nudging you towards the edge, tempting you. Do it, Lukas. Delete the post. Do it now and save our content moderator the trouble of reviewing your appeal.

Despite their best efforts, I went through with the appeal. I took a four day Twitter-break. At some point the content janitors got to it and when I checked the Twitter app everything was back to normal and my tweet was back up again. I’d secured a total victory against Elon himself.