Twitter

Controversial social media star Donald J. Trump has jumped to the defense of controversial social media stars Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson after controversial social media company Facebook banned them from Facebook, Instagram and other key institutions of the political-media complex. ‘So surprised to see Conservative thinkers like James Woods banned from Twitter, and Paul Watson banned from Facebook!’ Trump tweeted on Friday night. This is fake news. Twitter haven’t banned Woods. The digital nannies have only put him on the naughty step for appearing to suggest that Robert Mueller and his fellow reporters should be hanged. Woods and Watson are only ‘Conservative thinkers’ in the ‘Easter worshippers’ sense.

My first thought as news broke of the catastrophic fires raging in Notre-Dame Cathedral yesterday was, ‘I need to find the pictures of my trip to France.’ As the 856-year-old church creaked and crumbled, and smoke billowed over the French capital where Parisians had gathered to sing hymns, watching their beloved landmark burn in horror, my attention turned to the true victim of this tragedy: me, an American woman with an Instagram account. People don’t understand how much pressure there is as an American to hijack global heartbreak and personalize it. As a social media user, it’s imperative that in such dark times for humanity, you let everyone know you have a connection to this particular disaster, no matter how obscure or far removed in the past.

A while back, a friend in the San Francisco Bay Area confessed to me in a hushed tone that she was thinking of buying a gun. The neighborhood was a safe one. But she and her husband, no-nonsense tech executives with reasonably public profiles – the kind that might draw attention from internet crazies – but far from the means to hire private security, had calculated just how long it would take for police to reach their home in the event of an emergency, and they weren’t satisfied with it. With the Bay Area’s real estate market being what it is, giving up their below-market-value lease seemed more outlandish than exercising their Second Amendment rights.

Animal liberation charity PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has gone and done it again. Notorious for using cheap shock tactics to make a noise and pull in more donations, the organization sent a press release and posted a tweet within an hour of the announcement that fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld (for whom I personally felt no love) had died: ‘Karl Lagerfeld has gone, and his passing marks the end of an era when fur and exotic skins were seen as covetable. PETA sends condolences to our old nemesis’s loved ones.’ Last year, Lagerfeld, who had long defended his use of fur, conceded to demands that that he stop using fur and crocodile, lizard, snake and stingray skins in his designs.

Canadian feminist writer, Meghan Murphy, who was permanently suspended from Twitter last November, is suing the social media site for deceptive trade practices and breach of contract. ‘Twitter would never have attracted the hundreds of millions of users it boasts today had Twitter let it be known that it would arbitrarily ban users who did not agree with the political and social views of its management or impose sweeping new policies banning the expression of widely-held viewpoints and perspectives on public issues,’ Murphy’s lawyers submitted. Good for her!

It wasn’t so long ago Trump’s tweets were easily the planet’s most important media events. Comedy zingers, outrageous denunciations of the previously undenounceable, white knuckle threats of nuclear apocalypse sent in the small hours… how we hung on the leader of the free world’s every word. But now, suddenly, it feels like he’s phoning them in – tweeting by numbers. Where’s the brio? Where’s the zip? The heart seems gone. I can’t help but wonder if he needs more Executive Time. Sure, the insults and the catchphrases are still there, but they no longer carry the famous Trump bite. Take these tweets – two of his more lively – from the last seven days: https://twitter.

It’s A Song of ICE and Fire! Presumably peeved by the notion that Nancy Pelosi’s return to the Speaker’s chair and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high school musical were dominating the day’s headlines, Donald Trump blew off some steam by posting a load of memes on his social media. Topping the ‘Warren 1/2020th’ picture that he borrowed from the Daily Wire to mock the Massachusetts senator, the 45th President of the United States took to Instagram, to offer his followers this Game of Thrones-inspired image: https://www.instagram.com/p/BsMBeLbFLxd/ In George R. R. Martin’s books, The Wall is a 700-feet high divide that runs for one hundred leagues between the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros and the wild lands beyond.

I met Titania McGrath at the Genderfree Silent Poetry Class I used to attend on a Thursday evening at the Basement Bar in York. I remember her standing out from the rest of the artistes because of the amount of screaming she did. Since her first draft of ‘My Ovaries Are The Devil’s Kidneys’ which she wrote back in 2013, her work has come on in leaps and bounds, and improved with every court summons. More recently she has found her niche on Twitter. She inspires thousands of followers, or dare I say, disciples, with a heady mixture of defiant slam poetry and staunch feminist views. Her poems are raw, unbridled, angry, and often nonsensical. Like Lewis Carroll meets Quentin Tarantino.

I woke up this morning to a private message on Twitter from a young student. She had been warned that her account would be suspended if she ‘violated the rules’ again. Her crime? Tweeting details of Sheila Jeffreys’s book, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. Refusing to accept the mantra ‘Trans women are women’ is, in the eyes of many now, a crime, for which there must be punishment. Everyone from massive corporate social media machines to well-meaning liberals seem to be toeing the line. But some of us resist. Meghan Murphy for example, a Vancouver-based feminist journalist, has been permanently banned from Twitter for referring to a man who identifies as a woman as a man.

No one has mastered Twitter like Piers Morgan. Every day he singlehandedly generates great tsunamis of outrage and ecstatically surfs them onto the beach of global fame. In a time – and on a platform – where self-promotion is king, Morgan’s incredible talent for it stands out. Take this week. Morgan began by offering the opinion that Holly Willoughby, telegenic host of the popular British show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, had ‘very sizzling’ legs. Cue predictable howls of indignation about the sexual objectification of a high-profile woman. ‘But Holly’s legs ARE sizzling, just stating a fact’, he tweeted playfully. That was Monday. https://twitter.