Max’s Adventures in Social Media Land

Or, Why I Now Have More Time to Focus On My Novel Writing

Just as Alice fell through her looking glass into an alien space where she encountered absurd entities, so I fell through my computer screen into cyberspace, where I encountered my own absurd entities Facebook, Parler, OG Twitter and X.

I made a try at Facebook a few years ago, long before Zuckerberg’s recent conversion to free speech. I hated the notorious censorship, and I didn’t care about any stranger’s “Relationship Status.” (Umpteen years of marriage have settled mine.) So I quit.

I didn’t miss Facebook at all. Now I would have more time to focus on my novel writing.

Next came Parler. I joined in 2020, the fateful election year when all official forces were colluding to deny Donald Trump his second term. Millions of people censored on Twitter jumped to Parler as the free speech alternative. Most but not all new Parler entrants leaned conservative, and by making a few honest posts here and there, I quickly accumulated more than 18,000 followers.

But Parler founders had made a fatal mistake. They based their website on Amazon Web Services. In January, 2021, Amazon cancelled Parler, most likely to protect Jack Dorsey’s highly censored Twitter from the risk of free speech competition.

No web services, no Parler. Although Parler tried to come back, it never recovered.

The Parler collapse disappointed, but I now had more time to focus on my novel writing.

Sometime in there, I also joined Twitter, but I paid little attention to it. Then, animated by my opposition to the escalating left-wing fascism, including antisemitism and attacks on Israel, I wanted to do my bit, so I started tweeting serious arguments there, the kind of fact-based arguments a good lawyer would make.

I had barely made it out of the gate, accumulating something like 300 followers, before Twitter canceled my account without explanation. I followed their rules and submitted some appeals, but they ignored me.

Despite Twitter management’s claim that they censored so-called “hate speech,” Twitter was a bedlam of Jew hatred and anti-Israel lies. The fabled Red/Green alliance of communists and jihadis ruled. Twitter was clogged with Fascist Left and jihadi “activists” who collaborated with management to shut up anyone who dared to disagree with their mind-numbing hatred of America, Republicans, Israel, and Jews. (We now know more about the aggressive role of the “Biden Administration” in subverting the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment.)

Well, okay, but at least I would have more time to focus on my novel writing.

All of this was mere foreplay to the arrival of Elon Musk, trumpeted as the man who would bring free speech to Twitter, which he loudly bought and reimagined as “X.”

X sent me an email informing me that I was “reinstated.” That first email turned out to be false. A second email made the same claim. Relying on Elon Musk’s promises, and filled with hope and naivete, I created a new account under the name “cossack_max”, with the handle “Max Cossack.”

I posted the following profile: “Patriotic American, Proud Jew, Zionist, Novelist, Musician, Songwriter, Lawyer, Computer Programmer. Blessings to all people of good faith. See Amazon re books.”

The horrors of October 7, 2023, intensified my determination to speak up for Israel, the Jewish people and Western Civilization. I discovered other pro-Israel accounts, and we quickly began to recognize and support one another’s efforts. In short order, I accumulated a few thousand followers.

I paid $168 for this “blue-check” account.

During my time on X, I noticed a phenomenon inconsistent with Elon Musk’s free speech promise. Some Israel supporters reported being suspended and then reinstated and then having to start over from scratch with zero followers.

The following is not digression.

We human beings seem constitutionally compelled to count on merely human saviors. We excuse their bad behavior by pointing to bad underlings. “If only Dear Leader knew, he would never treat us like this.”

One famous instance came on January 22, 1905, In Russia. Father Gapon led a crowd of peaceful demonstrators toward the Winter Palace to present to their beloved Tsar Nicholas II a petition listing a few of their grievances. Their document was humble, respectful and subservient.

The Tsar’s soldiers fired on the crowd and killed at least a thousand. The slaughter became known as “Bloody Sunday.” The massacre helped cause the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions, in part because it disabused all but the most naïve Russians of the notion that it was only the Tsar’s evil ministers who did bad things and not the Tsar himself.

These days, for “Tsar’s Evil Ministers,” we can substitute slovenly bureaucrats and mindless algorithms.

After only a few months active on X, in March 2024, I was once again suspended, once again without explanation, and of course, once again my appeal through official X channels was ignored.

This time I do care, despite the renewed opportunity to focus on my novel writing. For one thing, I feel cheated, not only out of my money, but also out of my much more precious possession, the time I had spent posting on X in reliance on its owner Elon Musk’s many well-publicized promises to me and to others, like these:

“By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law…I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”

“Our mission at Twitter 2.0 is to promote and protect the public conversation. We believe Twitter users have the right to express their opinions and ideas without fear of censorship."

I care also because X has treated me like dirt. If I did by mistake write something which violated X rules, I cannot retract or correct it, since X has never condescended to explain to me what wrong words I wrote. Who knows? I might have written something whose significance I failed to recognize at the time.

While friends may have their doubts, I too am capable of being humble and respectful, although, like most Americans, I’m not very good at being subservient.

Even though X refused to explain my suspension to me, X did explain it to others. Whenever another X account holder searched on X for my account, X responded with this message:

“Account Suspended”

“X suspends accounts that violate Our Rules.”

The phrase “Our Rules” is linked via hyperlink to an explanation of “X Rules,” including, for example, rules against child sexual exploitation, targeted harassment, hateful conduct, violent content, and many other categories of shameful expression.

Since I am an author who writes and publishes novels and comments on various websites under the handle “Max Cossack,” X’s published assertion is libelous in the worst way. Lawyers will recognize it as libel per se, an especially egregious category in defamation law.

After all, aside from a few British Pakistani Muslims and their Labour Party and Tory Party facilitators, who wants to read anything written by someone suspended from a noted free speech platform for “child sexual exploitation”?

When I mentioned to a few friends that X had suspended my account, people assumed from Elon Musk’s sterling free speech reputation that I must have written something pretty awful.

This past October, my Dusty Little Village lawyer sent a letter to X summarizing my experience with X and asking for a few non-monetary remedies, including reinstatement to X and retraction of the libel. The signed Return Receipt proves X received it.

Like my Appeals within the Twitter/X system, my lawyer’s letter was ignored.

In December, 2024, X charged my credit card another $182.62 for a second year of the service X had already stopped providing me the previous March.

Evidently, X believed that my submitting myself to its clutches even once gave X the right to keep on charging me indefinitely, year after year, into the future, forever.

I contacted the credit card provider and disputed the new charge for this nonexistent second year, as well as the previous year’s charge.

When I told my lawyer about the new charge, she raised a good point. Knowing what we know about so many people’s inattention to their credit card charges, we should ask: how many other suspended accounts continue to get charged even after their suspensions? How many account holders notice the false charge and dispute it, or even know how to go about disputing a charge? How much money do X and other businesses gouge out of this shady business practice?

As Paul Simon sang,

“What is the point of this story?
What information pertains?
The thought that life could be better
Is woven indelibly
Into our hearts
And our brains.”

Put in plain prose, against all experience, we keep hoping.

What is true for me is true for you. Our freedom of speech, and especially our ability to be heard when we speak, along with all our other freedoms, is subject to nonstop subversion and is dependent on the vagaries of people and forces over which we have little control.

Elon Musk is probably a good guy. He probably supports free speech just as he says. He probably has bad ministers, or more likely bad algorithms.

Nevertheless we can’t afford to be dependent for our freedoms on this or that good guy.

Under our promising new Trump Administration, we can reasonably hope to see our freedoms better protected for the next few years. Maybe.

But after that, what?

Meanwhile, I will have plenty of time to focus on my novel writing.

Max Cossack is an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code). His most recent novel is High Jingo. He lives in a dusty little village in Arizona with his wife and no more cats.

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