UPDATE: My suspension has been lifted. The only reason they gave me was that they suspended my account for engaging in “spam, and fake or artificial account interactions and engagements.” Which is not something I do. I’ve asked for clarification.
Apparently, I’ve been a very bad boy. Last night, Twitter suspended my @Kleineganz account with no explanation. I keep checking my email, but so far zero communication. The standard appeal was filed, but I wasn’t even sure what to appeal. I wish I knew what I did to lead to this suspension.
YouTube Vlogs
I originally set up that Twitter account in 2011 to help support and promote my YouTube channel, which is still up and functional. While I don’t vlog as regularly as I used to, I was planning to do a countdown to my 50th birthday this year. That’s how all this started, with a countdown to my 40th birthday in 2011. Now I’ve lost, only temporarily, I hope, my primary vehicle to promote my vlogs.
The birthday countdown vlogs are something I plan to film in October and post in November. I could redo my entire countdown all over again, but I’ve decided I’ll just lump my previous decades together into new videos, recalling my childhood, teens, twenties, and thirties, before diving into a year-by-year recollection of my forties.
Do I think anyone is interested enough in my life to care? Not really, but that’s besides the point. I’m doing this for myself. It’s fun to look back at where my life was before. Even if no one else watches the videos, I can look back on them, especially as I get older.
Twitter Suspension
Okay, so back to this suspension business. Currently, I can only speculate to what might have led to this suspension. I’ve wracked my brain, thinking about what could have led to it. I’ve also read through the Twitter Rules to see if anything there might spark an idea.
As I’ve said, I’ve had the account for nearly a decade, launched in October 2011. During that decade, I tweeted sporadically. My blog post from here and my vlogs from YouTube were the most active things I had for a long time. I was more active on Tumblr until I got purged for having an 18+ account, where I retweeted a lot of NSFW fanart.
After the Tumblr purge, I dipped my toe back into Twitter, but I still wasn’t very engaged on that account until 2020. That’s when I fell into the Supernatural fandom on Twitter. With the finale of the show fast approaching, I needed people to talk to. Since I couldn’t talk to them on Tumblr anymore, Twitter was my go-to source of gossip and news. I quickly became very engaged with the Supernatural fandom. Even after the finale aired, there has been a lot of activity within that fandom on Twitter.
Because of my sporadic use of this Twitter account over the years, I’m fairly certain that whatever caused me to be suspended wasn’t from years ago. It had to be from something within the last 1-2 years, since I increased my activity on the platform. At first I thought it might have been related to a heated debate I had with Buck Angel, a well-known transgender porn star who has unfortunately ingratiated himself with the “gender critical” community. Let’s say he and I don’t agree on certain things regarding being trans.
That wasn’t it. I checked and I had that debate with Buck through my other Twitter account, where I promote my trans positive articles that I write on Medium.
I have encountered some fandom drama on Twitter, but I didn’t engage in it that often, and hardly with the level of vitriol some people do, and their accounts have remained unaffected. I do my best to avoid name calling when I’m debating things online, and if a discussion devolves into that, I walk away and block people rather than escalate further.
Even as I write this blog entry, I’m thinking of all the interactions I’ve had on Twitter recently and absolutely nothing comes to mind that would meet the criteria of breaking any of the rules, much less warrant having my entire account shut down.
It’s possible that someone who decided they didn’t like me for some reason and chose to report me, but I’m not even sure what they’d report me for. I am a passionate fan of Supernatural and especially the actor Misha Collins and his character of Castiel. I know there’s a small contingent of so-called fans who absolutely despise Misha and Castiel, but even if they reported me for retweeting things from that actor, I can’t imagine that would warrant an account suspension.
Bottom line, I’m baffled. I’m also upset because I can no longer engage with the fandom I’ve gotten to know so well over the past year. I do have two other Twitter accounts, but they are specifically focused on the writing community and for promoting my writing. I don’t want to mix my fandom interests in with either of those two accounts.
In many ways, this feels like they have purged again me, for no other reason that merely existing. It’s affected my mood and makes me want to just crawl into bed and hide from the world for a while. I didn’t know what else to do, so I’m just venting about it in this blog post while I wait for Twitter to respond to my appeal. I’ll post an update on the situation when I know more.
If you’re still reading, thanks for hanging in there!
Kleineganz 
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