Alright you guys. I’m just sending this quick post out to let you guys know why I’m not on Twitter anymore, as of today, and don’t plan to return. I know a lot of you found me on Twitter, and I wouldn’t have left unless it was urgent. So here’s what’s going on.
This morning, I woke up to find that Twitter had monetized my account. I did not monetize my account. And yet, there it was, the little stupid cash icon, right there in my profile. My profile was linked to a CashApp account that ISN’T MINE.
To say this alarmed me would be understatement.
At first, I thought my account must have been hacked by someone hoping to generate income for themselves off the popularity of my Long Covid posts. But when I went into my Twitter settings to see if I could remove the monetization - you should be able to turn it off, it’s the “tips” function - it became clear that Twitter itself had monetized my account, and set up a dummy CashApp account as a placeholder. Then when I went in to turn that off, the app demanded that I couldn’t do that unless I consent to a new set of rules in order to turn it off, and those rules included agreeing to allow Twitter to revoke or delete my account for any reason they like, and waiving my right to a jury trial against Twitter for any reason. Furthermore, they required that I actually link a real CashApp or other type of cash-transfer account to my Twitter account before I could even sign off on those disgusting rules. So no. That was a big no.
I’ve been wanting to get off that app for a while now. Elon Musk has destroyed Twitter. Like many people with Long Covid, I stayed on Twitter because it has been a pretty great source over the past 3.5 years for information about the disease. But the people I most reliably follow for that information have all migrated to Threads, as have I.
It does suck to lose the base of 20,000+ followers I had diligently built over many years. But I don’t trust Elon Musk, and the latest shenanigans, trying to get into my finances, indicate to me that he plans, at best, to purge all progressive thinkers from Twitter altogether and, at worst, to monitor them for some other purpose.
If you are still on Twitter and you value these posts of mine here on LONGISH, please feel free to share them there and elsewhere. I hope the word gets out to the people who counted on me for Long Covid information that I am no longer there, but I’m on Threads and Instagram and Facebook and here on Substack. So. I haven’t disappeared, I’m just not in Elon’s world anymore.
I had to delete my account quickly, because I did not want people thinking I had monetized it (gross) and I absolutely didn’t want people donating money to some account in my name that did not, in fact, belong to me, and probably belonged to Elon Musk, which Twitter refused to remove unless I agreed to let the app do abusive things to me.
So that’s what’s going on. See ya around.