Good morning.
Thanks to my friends and followers who are trying to help overturn my suspension and those of my friends.
I have had 2 contacts from Twitter support and the situation remains open-ended.
I sent a tweet out Tuesday morning regarding bots tweeting negative hashtags about the Iowa primary. This is something we see more and more. Overnight, bots are trending hashtags to sow division and manipulate our elections. If you take a look at most of them, they retweet MAGA tags and pro-one-candidate-or-bust tweets. They are able to quickly trend these tags because there are rooms full of them operating multiple accounts each. It overwhelms our individual voices.
If you don’t look at these false accounts, they look like normal accounts supporting a Dem candidate. They’re not. Not everyone using these tags is a bot from Russia, but that’s how they try to manipulate our feelings about candidates and the Democratic party.
My tweet was attempting to squash that manipulatation and division.
The amount of negative responses I received from dual Trump/Sanders supporters and some Trump/Sanders/Yang supporters (not things that exist in reality) in a short period of time simply proved my point.
There is only one of me and I cannot imagine the volume of false reports that were generated about me and some people who were supporting my tweet to result in a mass suspension. It’s not the first time I’ve been swarmed by this type of thing, nor am I the only person it’s happened to. They seek to silence the truth.
Twitter does not have a good policy to deal with this or all of the January-created 2 follower bots would be suspended and I would not be.
Whatever happens, be alert and aware that these things are going on and that there are people with bad intentions desperate to manipulate your thinking and your vote. If we want to save ourselves from a growing autocracy, we have to stop this. We have to work together and be decent to each other along the way.
Many people have asked why we use these names on Twitter and not our own. Many people, including some very well-known accounts, do not use their names on Twitter. If you have a prominent account, threats are not unusual. If you work with or inside the government, you won’t be if you let them know who you are. It’s not really anyone’s business why people tweet as a superhero, a cow, a horse, a parody of what you choose, or a cardboard Cory Gardner.
My friends and I made these accounts organically as friends and grew the group organically as we made new friends along the way. Plenty of people tweet with us who are not hero characters or use another type of character. It’s not uncommon. We like Marvel or DC and it inspires us.
At any rate, I hope to be back. If not, I will find a new way to resist online. I do a significant amount of my resisting in person and I hope you do, too, if you are able. Not everyone is, so I try to do more than my share.
Thanks, again.
Tony
Home of Heroes 