There are two really important things happening on Twitter right now: one is #GamerGate and the other is Twitter’s “collaboration” with WAM (Women Action and Media) to thought police Twitter users and remove anything or anyone that “offends” feminists and other social justice warriors.
Guess who offends a lot of feminists?
I can’t let these particular tweets die. I just can’t. They are too funny. And they are the perfect explanation of what “offends” feminists.
Facts and evidence. That is a very basic description of what I tweet, and because the facts don’t line up with feminist ideology, I am consistently reported as an abusive account. Here are some examples of things I tweet, for those who are not interested in the clusterfuck that is Twitter.
So much abuse, amirite?
Taylor Swift has become the soundtrack to my life on Twitter at the moment:
Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off
Then I go and sign up for a new Twitter account and collect all my old followers and I carry on posting abuse facts and evidence. The feminist trolls show up screaming, I give them links to credible sources, they call me stupid and huff off in a hissy fit to report me for harassment. I’m telling on you! Grown women and men acting like spoiled toddlers? Yeah, nothing new when you’re dealing with feminists.
#GamerGate critics have been very open about collecting names and subjecting them to banbot attacks to trigger automatic suspends and I know for a fact users have targeted me for false flagging campaigns, because one of them bragged about it. She spent two months of her life false flagging me to trigger a suspend.
The ban bots can be quite effective, and even managed to bring down @Nero, but Twitter wisely restored his account promptly. There are ways to defeat the bots and they can be similarly effective. It’s much harder (although far from impossible) to defeat a human being inside Twitter, butthurt and juvenile, who chooses to suspend accounts before they have sent a single tweet.
My username was changed, my password was changed and my email address was changed.
I am not being subjected to bot attacks that are reporting me for abuse or harassment. I am a target for a social justice warrior or feminist zealot inside Twitter. I suppose a very dedicated hacker might have broken through Twitter firewalls and modified the account, but that seems highly unlikely. The juvenile changing of my username strongly suggests we are dealing with butthurt ideologues who refuse to accept that they are losing the war and that with every voice they silence, #GamerGate and #WomenAgainstFeminism grow stronger. Even Ben Dreyfusswho writes for MotherJones agrees that the censorship is unwarranted.
Let me take a moment to address the Ben Dreyfuss situation. He sent out this tweet, which taken out of context, makes him look like a giant asshole.
Someone memed the tweet with a picture of Robin Williams, and the tweet took off and Ben caught some holy hell. He tweeted me directly, and posted the context, at which point I apologized unreservedly.
The tweet was shitty, but the context does indeed explain a lot. He was goaded by a troll (let’s hope it was a troll and that guy wasn’t for real) into tweeting something he came to regret. Ben apologized and Twitter moved on. See? It’s possibly to have profoundly different ideas about issues like feminism and gaming and still act like fucking adults capable of handling an alternate and opposing point of view. “Just shut up and go away” is the refuge of the cowardly and willfully ignorant.
I understand that Twitter is a private business and can do whatever the hell it likes, but if Twitter is allowing employees to censor points of view they happen to differ with, Twitter needs to own that. Quoting from @Nero’s article up at Breitbart News today, “mass suspensions of Twitter accounts that have the temerity to publicly support press reform and reject feminist critiques of video games as irrelevant, sneering, pseudo-academic drivel are now being attempted by impotent feminist groups whose only weapon is the silencing of dissent.”
If Twitter wants to line up with the evangelists who think statistics are not facts and evidence is not proof, they are free to do so. If suppressing freedom of speech is their new business model then let them proclaim it for all to see. Twitter is absolutely entitled to shoot themselves in the head. They can hold hands with “a press that, swamped with discredited far-Left ideology and unintelligent, poorly-trained writers, refuses to tell basic truths”, and then they can prepare to meet the same end all totalitarian regimes achieve: total and utter defeat.
I challenge Twitter to stand up to wingnut bullies and restore my original account. If Twitter can take on ISIS, how in the hell does Janet Bloomfield frighten them? Really?
Grow a pair, Twitter.
Ben Dreyfuss can handle a little heat and you can too.
Lots of love,
JB
PS: Keep an eye out for me on Twitter. My plan is shaping up nicely 🙂
judgybitch 
I agree with you about censorship being evidence of the insecurities of the group trying to do the censoring.
But…I’ve googled Heather McMelon and I can’t figure out who she is or why you called her a HeffaLump. I’m familiar with the term “heffalump” from Winnie the Pooh, and I just looked it up in the Urban dictionary and see that it is now sometimes used to express hatred for fat people and/or “oafs.”
You seem too intelligent to just attack someone whose ideas you don’t like by saying, “Well, you’re fat!” I’m not saying you’re not “free” to do that — but it just makes you look less intelligent than you really are.
But maybe I’m just too old and behind the times to even figure out what most tweets really mean — maybe you were saying something entirely different and I’m just not getting it. It’s probably a good thing I don’t try to read Twitter.
LikeLike
JB, your opponents are pretty awful. I don’t know if you can use it but, overwhelming cuteness may be a weapon against them. Consider this:
LikeLike
I think the issue right now is that while Gamergaters are winning at the moment, they don’t know the full extent to which SJWs throughout history have gone in order to force their lethal endgame on to people.
The fullest extent of their will was carried out in the basement of the Lubyanka building. The early 90’s film “The Chekist” (watchable on youtube) gave the world some concept of what horrors these sub-human monsters are capable of.
LikeLike
I’ve been watching this drama with some interest.
The next step is to move the conflict into real life.
LikeLike
I don’t recall calling anyone a Heffalump.
LikeLike
Twitter censorship is nothing new, and it’s always been nonsensical.
The crap part of WAM’s involvement is the patent targeting. Their two person uber leftist and fem’ supremacist team necessarily functions to squelch out only certain voices. Cast a wider net? My ass. It’s micro targeting dissent.
Their desired end result: a safe place for women [to act irresponsibly and not get called out for it] on Twitter. Hooray equality!
LikeLike
OMG Squee!!!!!!
LikeLike
About whether or not statistics are facts — if they’re honestly and accurately compiled, then you can pretty well say that such-and-such statistical result was true, or factual, for the people in the study.
But the ways different people choose to INTERPRET those statistics can’t always be assumed to be fact-based. I recall your post about the study that showed that minorities scored lower on IQ tests than whites. The guy who did the research apparently interpreted these statistics as saying that minorities shouldn’t have the same educational opportunities as whites. You very wisely pointed out that early nutrition can have a huge bearing on mental development, and that a more logical interpretation of the results would be to invest in children’s nutrition.
If we can wrap our heads around the idea that INTERPRETATIONS of statistics are theories and not facts — then we can evaluate each theory in terms of its potential helpfulness or harmfulness. Deciding that the research indicates that we should close certain doors for minorities seems way more potentially harmful, and less helpful, than investing in nutrition, so the nutritional theory seems like a good one to try out first.
If statistics end up showing that better early nutrition has no bearing on cognitive development, then maybe it’s time to try out other theories. As a humanist, though, I think the theory about closing doors for certain groups of people is absolutely inhuman.
LikeLike
Your first example reads: “JudgyBitch retweeted HeffaLump @HeatherMcMelon.” Oh, I get it now, somebody’s username was “HeffaLump” and “HeatherMcMelon” is probably her blog or website, and then the content of your message is below all that. Sorry, my bad. I told you I’m too old and slow to read Twitter. 🙂
LikeLike
Lol! Yes, her user name is Heffalump. She chose that herself. If I recall correctly, she was replying to the CDC numbers on “made to penetrate”, claiming that collecting those numbers didn’t mean the numbers were true. http://time.com/3393442/cdc-rape-numbers/
There was no nuanced argument there. Just a lalalalalaIcan’thearyou denial that if you define rape as “unwanted sex” full stop, men and women have virtually identical numbers of reported incidences.
LikeLike
I’m sure that’s why they’re so intent on putting “made to penetrate” in an entirely different category. What I really hate is the way this demeans little boys and adolescents who’ve been victimized by adult women.
LikeLike
Susan – you are mistaken. JB didn’t call Ms. McMelon a heffalump. “Heffalump” was Ms. McMelon’s chosen username, (chosen by Ms. McMelon herself).
She’s calling HERSELF a heffalump.
LikeLike
She is technically right – statistics aren’t facts. They are a method by which you can try to establish fact, but to say “80% of black men will do time in prison at some point in their life, therefore black men are criminals” is not factual unless you can establish some sort of additional evidence beyond the stat.
LikeLike
State Orders Man to Pay $30k in Child Support or Face Jail …benswann.com/state-orders-man-to-pay-30k-in-child-support-or-face-jail…
this is a perfect exmple of Men have no rights in this world
if this had happen to a woman it would be all over the news EVEN on CNN
women are making babies to scam welfare and boost their lifestyle and the government and justice system encorage it
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 14:27:10 +0000 To: shameb@msn.com
LikeLike
The Magnus Test for seeing if you are on the side of wrong:
“Does your side try and stifle freedom of speech, or censor people who disagree with you?”
If the answer is yes, then you are on the side of wrong.
How plainly can it be said?
LikeLike
Thanks; I figured it out belatedly. 🙂
LikeLike
Well, twitter has the right to censor anyone they want for any reason they want.
Are you going to take issue with AVFM banning their critics too?
LikeLike
Perhaps the answer could be lots of Black Knighting
LikeLike
Years in the future Twitter and Facebook will be seen as part of the decline of civilized conversation, intelligent discourse, and replacement of values that have done us well for 200,000 or more years with ones that corrupt our humanity.
This is a perfect example why I don’t waste ANY time on either of theses poxes.
The Idiocracy is here.
LikeLike
The difference is that AVfM is open about what will get you banned. Feminists are allowed to comment there. Twitter is not being truthful about what will get you banned. Because “I don’t agree with you” sounds pretty shitty
LikeLike
JB – I’m likewise outraged by the cavalier censoring of your accounts. And the outright theft of your latest really is disturbing if it is an inside job.
But please understand that what Twitter is up to has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with their demographic, or rather, their advertisers’ demographic. Think of Twitter as some massive shopping mall. They wantas many in as possible of the target demographic and if the word gets out that the mall “isn’t safe for women” then it’s a serious business problem. Truth doesn’t factor in. Just perception.
Pressing the point. Mentally walk through a physical mall . Who is there? Who are the vast majority of stores catering to? Most of all, who is doing the buying? Women, of course.
Twitter, Instagram, FB are all massive business plays for retail consumer eyeballs. They know women have immense financial power and want it properly “encouraged.” Hence, the censoring of anything that makes the desired customer demographic unhappy.
That being said let’s get you back in the saddle at Twitter and call out the hypocrites. Just remember that it’s $$ not feminists pulling the strings…..
LikeLike
That’s a really good perspective I had not considered. We need more anti-feminist shoppers in that mall then. Most women are not feminists. A massive signal boost could get Twitter to see the feminazis are chasing away all the other customers
LikeLike
I’m going to send a copy of this to Maggie McNeill, because if feminists can use this tactic to target JB, it’s only a matter of time before they also target sex worker rights activists.
LikeLike
I lost interest in Twitter. At the end of the day, I don’t think I was ever that popular to have followers anyway. It always felt a little like I was pissing into the wind. And most of the time, it felt as though I was talking in a big black empty room.
I also got sick and tired of the fact that women felt free on there to hurl abuse and even threaten lives and the Twitter moderators wouldn’t even bother responding when I lodged complaints about it.
So now that they are taking the side of these same, violent individuals, in order to silence everyone else, I have even less interest. There’s no point in having a “safe place for women” if everyone else is made to feel threatened. I think it’s time they check their privilege.
LikeLike
I’m advancing an additional definition for Manosphere use.
Heffalump: A regular or semi-regular source of woozles.
LikeLike
I don’t buy your explanation for two reasons:
1. The censorship of JB is too crude and too easilly exposed for the blatant bias it is – I cannot see upper level management ever sanctioning such tactics.
2. The childish messing around with her username again does not point to an official “pander to the nutjob feminists” but does strengthen Janets speculation that there are SJW’s on the twitter staff that are acting extremeraly unprofessionally . This stuff happens on Comment Is Free with the online version of the Gaurdian newspaper all the time. The thing is that newspaper has only a tiny faction of the userbase of twitter.
Personally I think a good targeted campaign towards upper management of Twitter could be effective in causing a purge of those abusing their postions .
LikeLike
I wouldn’t forgive Ben Dreyfus so readily. When I ponder forgiving someone, I think “would they do the same for me?” Seriously, how often does someone say something like what he said only about women or an ethnic minority, and not get shunned? Would ‘context’ be accepted as an excuse then? I mean how many ‘misogynistic’ quotes of yours would someone like him cherry pick if he knew them? I know, some people might say one shouldn’t treat people as bad as they treat you, or maybe if you forgive them they’ll rethink their animosity and be better in the future. But I’m more of the belief that forgiving a Dreyfuss for saying something like that will only go toward convincing him he can do it in the future with impunity. The more you give, the more they take.
LikeLike
I like all of your images/funnies on here- do you make those yourself?
LikeLike
Some I make but most are sent to me on Twitter or Facebook.
LikeLike
Most of the problem creators are the white knights along with feminist. They will try everything to scuttle people who want to promote equality. Anyone who challenges radical feminist becomes their target. http://lifenstory.com/white_knight_syndrome
LikeLike
Hi Janet, hope you get to keep one of your accounts one of these days.
But you should know (and can verify – tweetsave.com for example saved everything) Dreyfuss made that tweet before the tweets from the nazi. The “context” is a scam. It’s the worst reaction to the tweet he could find and he’s using it as an excuse.
Not that it would be an excuse. He said what he said. He has violent racist fantasies like most SJWs.
LikeLike
How about we setup say one judgy_bitchXXXX account each and see how long they last. If we have say a thousand accounts from all around the world and they start getting picked off without anything being posted on them then maybe we’ll be able to prove something is a bit dodgy.
LikeLike
I have create a French website to promote full equality, in particular in order to point out discrimination that men face, along with a twitter account.
The twitter account was suspended 3 times in 48 hours (wtf?!), each time with a different excuse, and before even having a single follower.
Extreme feminists have taken control of twitter and are using censorship even before tweet a single tweet.
We should launch a campaign to boycott twitter for censorship and use another service.
LikeLike
Any techie guys here want to get together and create a new service?
LikeLike
200,000 years? Huh. In my timeline many nations still had legal forms of slavery into the 20th century.
LikeLike
I think I over-reacted. Sure twitter is no longer a free-speech place, but our goal is to promote equality to the general public (and counter the hate speech of some extremist groups). Banishing ourselves from twitter would only result in less outreach for our message. I mean, it’s no use if our audience is only ourselves.
The game is rigged, and the rules are unfair, but what options do we have?
We just have to keep faith. Freedom, justice and equality will win at then end. Just keeping faith in our struggle and we are sure we have the high moral ground here: they advocate for hate, misandry and fear, and we’ll continue advocating for true equality, justice and freedom.
LikeLike
Hi. I’ve been watching your troubles on twitter, and there is a gmail trick I was informed of a few months ago that allows you to have multiple twitter accounts on one gmail address. The trick is to add a ‘+’ and an arbitrary string of characters before the ‘@’ sign. To illustrate: if your address is jb@gmail .com, it can be changed to jb+001@gmail, and you should still get mail sent to the previous address. Doesn’t help with devious twit employees, but useful, nonetheless.
LikeLike
A troll could simply have bruteforced (or otherwise obtained) your password. No reason not to try again with good security in mind.
LikeLike
Winning… what? There’s a few hundred thousand of them, and they’re mostly being ignored.
LikeLike
It’s also irrelevant whether anyone called anyone a heffalump.
LikeLike
We’re gamers.
We don’t stop playing until we win.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Stop getting offended. Religion does it all the time. and commented:
Perhaps her hypothesis on a Twitter feminist intern makes sense after all…
LikeLike