When Elon Musk took over Twitter there was a great deal of debate about what to do and if there was a more congenial alternative. I have been on Twitter since August 2014 (@thomasruffles) but solely use it to log my writing activities, so post only occasionally. I wasn’t happy with the way the new owner was behaving and kept hearing about Mastodon as a kinder, more caring, community than Musk-era Twitter was shaping to be, so thought I would take a look.
While not as sophisticated as Twitter, I
thought there would be no harm in opening a Mastodon account while the Twitter
ferment resolved itself one way or another.
I decided, like the majority, not to jump ship completely and close my
Twitter account. As it happens, while there
are still controversies swirling around Musk’s interventions, Twitter seems to
have settled down and I have retained my presence there.
Thus I have been running the two side by
side for several months. However, I
thought I would be more expansive on Mastodon, and as well as list my writing
note other things I do in what might loosely be called my cultural life. So on 28 March, for example, I visited the Islanders exhibition at the Fitzwilliam
Museum in Cambridge and had a VR experience, walking round a Neolithic village
on Cyprus, which I noted with a link to the relevant Fitzwilliam website page.
Recently I have been watching talks on
YouTube. Nancy Zingrone has been
uploading lectures in her Parapsychology:
Research and Education Massively-Open Online Course (ParaMOOC 2023) series,
and C J Romer those given to the Association for the Scientific Study of
Anomalous Phenomena in its regular weekly programme. I have been slowly working through the
backlog and recording my progress on Mastodon.
During the evening of Saturday 1 April I
watched a ParaMOOC talk on poltergeists in Brazil and put it on Mastodon as
usual, with a link. To my surprise, on
the morning of Sunday 2 April I found that overnight I had received the
following email headed ‘Your account @tomruffles@toot.site has been
suspended’. Initially assuming it was a
phishing scam, I discovered my account really had been suspended:
‘You can no longer use your account, and
your profile and other data are no longer accessible. You can still login to
request a backup of your data until the data is fully removed in about 30 days,
but we will retain some basic data to prevent you from evading the suspension.’
What had I done to contravene Mastodon’s
norms of good behaviour?
‘Reason: Content violates the following
community guidelines
‘Malicious or misleading information (such
as, but not limited to, anti-science, fake news and hate brigading) are
bannable offences. This also includes the encouragement and normalising of said
information. Such content can, for example, include anti-vaccine and
alternative medicine.’
Wow, that does sound bad, yet I was
confused, and not merely by the use of brigading, as my posts seemed harmless
to me and far from warranting such a severe charge. Fortunately, Mastodon was on hand to point
out the offending items. There were five
in total, each of which I had provided with a link to the relevant YouTube
content:
I'm working my way through the excellent
ParaMOOC 2023 talks organised by Nancy Zingrone and Bryan Williams. Fatima
Machado gave a wide-ranging talk on poltergeist cases in Brazil. (1 April)
ASSAP Webinar - "Ghosts: S is for
Survey" - another talk by C J Romer which largely focuses on the work of
the early SPR, A large number of ASSAP videos have been uploaded to YouTube.
(29 March)
ASSAP Webinar: CJ Romer on "Are
Poltergeists A Thing?" - has lots of references to the SPR. (28 March)
ASSAP Webinar - Dr Kate Cherrell on
"Death, Debt and Gin: Scratching Fanny and The Cock Lane Ghost" was a
thorough overview of this seminal case. [OK, I concede I was a bit naughty
there, slipping in the word seminal]. (27 March)
Allison Jornlin gave a thorough overview
in her ParaMOOC 2023 talk 'The Hidden Ghost Hunter: Remembering Catherine
Crowe', a figure who deserves to be better remembered in the field (the talk is
also available on the Paranormal Women YouTube channel) (23 March)
It looked like my VR experience was not
contentious, while Brazilian poltergeists were the final straw. I was told: ‘If you believe this is an error,
you can submit an appeal to the staff of toot.site.'
Hmmm.
I wasn’t sure it was an error, because it felt like the sort of
treatment the Guerrilla Skeptics and their allies mete out to Wikipedia entries they find not to their taste. The bit I was deemed to have breached was
probably the anti-science stricture, interpreted by the administrators to mean
what they wanted it to mean. What the
hell, I fired off an appeal immediately:
‘These are parapsychology talks given by
respectable researchers on serious topics.
You may not agree with the content, but they do not fall foul of your
criteria. If you feel that the ban is
warranted, frankly you are a bunch of bigots and I wouldn’t want to be on your
platform anyway.’
Take that, Mastodon. They’ve not yet got back to me. As well as my own, I also run the Society for
Psychical Research’s Mastodon feed, @SPR1882@mastodon.social, and so far
it has remained untouched. Perhaps the
SPR’s name gives the posts more protection.
Alternatively, Mastodon has a federated system, and it could be the
‘social’ administrators are more liberal, or better informed, than the toot.site
bunch.
It’s not even as if my account has much of
a reach. It is a lot easier to find
people on Twitter, and my Mastodon follower numbers have remained stubbornly
low – the only person who seriously engages with my posts there is my
Parapsychological Association colleague Craig Weiler, author of Psi Wars: TED, Wikipedia and the Battle for
the Internet (thanks Craig).
So if I am banned it won’t be much of a
loss either to me or to Mastodon, but it rather dents their image as the
softer, inclusive, somewhat counter-cultural alternative to Musk’s
Twitter. Their page exhorting people to
join states:
‘Your home feed should be filled with what
matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see. Radically
different social media, back in the hands of the people.’
It’s definitely not in the hands of this
person, instead censoring content Twitter and YouTube have no problem with
simply because the moderators happen to dislike it. While I don’t believe Mastodon has fulfilled
its promise as a viable alternative to Twitter I was happy to stick with it. I never imagined it would have a problem with
parapsychology and I would find myself accused of peddling malicious or misleading
information.
Update 5 April 2023:
I had assumed that the toot.site
administrators would have the courtesy to inform me of the outcome of my appeal
by email. Wondering why they were taking
so long, I went to my blocked page to discover they had in fact made their
determination very quickly on Sunday 2 April but had not bothered to let me
know.
Their verdict was a curt ‘Your appeal has
been rejected.’ I had failed to persuade
them of my case. Perhaps they didn’t
like my attitude, though what I said was true, but it is possible that nothing
would have made a difference because they had already decided my fate, and in
their ignorance believed that by linking to ParaMooc and ASSAP talks I was
promoting pseudo-science.
I am sorry I was kicked off unfairly, but
it’s their service and they can do what they like. Anyone who wants to post material relating to
parapsychology should steer clear of this particular chunk of Mastodon. I had intended to give up the whole site as a
bad job, but although dispirited by my experience to date, I was curious to see
if other nodes were more tolerant so I have signed up to
@TomRuffles@geekdom.social.
Doubtless I’ll post the same sorts of
items I did on toot.site, and will see if their administrators have a more
relaxed attitude to parapsychology.
Perhaps I was just unlucky in my initial choice, and administrators
happy to embrace geekdom will find my posts acceptable. In the long term, I’ll be interested to see
how Mastodon develops, but my experience to date suggests it is never going to
be a serious player in the social media landscape.
Update 23 September 2023:
My Mastodon experiment didn’t last long,
as I put my last post on geekdom.social on 25 July, and I also abandoned the Society
for Psychical Research account. I wasn’t
banned by the administrators, in fact they seemed tolerant of my whacky
psychical research interest, but there isn’t much point being on a platform if
nobody notices what one is posting there.
Almost as soon as I signed up to geekdom I felt it was not going to
prove useful thanks to the difficulty in building a community when the federated
structure is an obstacle.
Just as I was becoming disillusioned with
my Mastodon experience along came Threads, Mark Zuckerberg’s rival to Twitter,
or X as it is now annoyingly called.
This seemed a better option than Mastodon for building connections
because it was launched on the back of Instagram, its many users forming a
ready-made community, and it didn’t have the fragmented nature of
Mastodon. I already had an Instagram
presence, though I didn’t use it much, so signing up would be easy.
I’m not a fan of Zuckerberg, and like
others think Threads is a terrible name because of the connotations of nuclear
war it evokes thanks to the film Threads. Even so, I thought I would give it a go, so
on 6 July I opened a Threads account (@tomhruffles@threads.net). Initially it was mobile phone-only, which I
didn’t like because I find it a pain to use a phone for text, and I left it at
a couple of test posts. I was pleased when
the desktop version was launched, news reaching me on 24 August, and I’ve been
adding to my feed on an occasional basis.
My usage is much the same as with Mastodon, including links to my writing (duplicating my X posts), but including other activities which may be of interest. Unfortunately, despite the advantage of having Instagram as a base, Threads is proving about as useful as Mastodon. After the initial flurry of excitement, with huge numbers signing up, interest has waned and I am finding the same level of engagement – close to zero. I’ll doubtless carry on using it, but without much enthusiasm. Ah well, I gave it a go.
