Censorship on Social Media
Unlike loathsome Facebook...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/facebook-advocates-government-regulation-online-speech/
Twitter doesn't censor. I have spent several online hours in committees discussing why Twitter must avoid any kind of overt censorship, no matter how many alleged people scream that any opposition to their point of view might catch the eye of a dangerous lunatic and be involved in the ravings of the next Prozac Dementia homicide-suicide case. People who are violently insane may blame the Republicans; they may blame the Democrats; they may blame the weather, or the moon, or what they distinctly heard a rock tell them to do. We don't censor Republicans or Democrats, nor do we try to destroy rocks, because of this. We lock up the poor lost souls, if we get to them before they kill themselves, and pray that psychiatrists can find ways to deactivate the violence circuits in their brains while leaving them enough working neurons to sort socks in a Goodwill warehouse, although so far this is not guaranteed and it might be more humane just to kill them...In any case, we recognize that ideas millions of responsible adults can discuss and debate without even resorting to profanity are not to be blamed when people who are not responsible adults become violent.
My stake in Twitter owes something to a mistake (long story, not available online) but, after years of not doing Twitter and then years of using it only every few months, I have acquired a small stake in Twitter. I've seen that its fast-paced, headlines-only format, which initially seemed silly, can have a really valuable part in mass communications--in emergencies, e.g., where Twits can track weather disasters and use any working cell phones to find and help survivors. I care personally about keeping this site from going the way of either Facebook, which is simply rotten to the core, or Freedom Connector (the one I remember fondly) or other social media sites that self-destructed by targeting only one side of a debate.
There have been social sites that protected people from any kind of disagreement by advertising that they were there for one group or another. Freedom Connector was "for" Tea Parties; it fell apart when (1) some Tea Parties realized how diverse the appeal of "Taxed Enough Already" really was--I like that, but some people couldn't handle it, and (2) the rest realized that almost all Tea Parties are made up of taxpayers who have jobs, most of which don't have titles like "Social Media Consultant" and don't allow a lot of time for online socializing with random new acquaintances. I remember spending an hour or two with a site that was "for" Christians, long dead for similar reasons, and actually doing a few live chats at a site that was "for" Republicans. (No, I wasn't needling them; I was chatting about live networking opportunities. That would have been a cool site, had it survived.) There've been social sites for left-wingers and many other interest groups too. I've actually been paid to play hostess on a few; they all paid other hosts too, and that's not why most of them have fallen apart and the ones that still survive without paid hosts aren't growing. There are a few truly great blogs--Making Light used to be one, and Ozarque's while she was living, and The Blaze while Glenn Beck was still there, and Scott Adams' blog before he went video-only, and Return To Order for conservative Catholics, and who else remembers Matt Drudge and Brad Hicks?--that attract enough like-minded people to come back enough times that e-friendships form. I've wished this blog would become one of them. But in the absence of a really good celebrity writer who consistently delivers interesting content that keeps the chat going and personally moderates the comments, these like-minded community sites do not become miniature social sites. The social media sites that work have to keep the doors open and let everyone, including rude kids and Flat Earthers, find their own social circles.
(Before anyone says "If you, writer known as Priscilla King, were going around these sites clobbering people with your opinions, no wonder..."--Hello? This is my site. My job here is to air my own opinions. As a paid hostess on other people's sites, my job is/was to get other people to share their opinions. I found out firsthand at what point each site started automatically blocking responses to comment like "LOL" or "Dittos" or "Tell us more?")
Vaccination
So, recently on Twitter people claimed that panic about a measles outbreak was making them feel justified in demanding a social media ban on "anti-vax" content.
I propose as a general Meta-Rule for all social media:
THE SIDE CALLING FOR CENSORSHIP OF OPPOSING OPINIONS IS ADMITTING IT CAN'T WIN A RATIONAL DEBATE, AND CAN SAFELY BE CONSIDERED "WRONG."
The "pro-vax" corporate shills are so misguided they don't even notice that there's a wide range of opinions about measles vaccinations. I actually favor them--only for couples who are trying to become parents without having had the disease or the vaccine as kids. Fetuses can be damaged by the effects of live measles, mumps, or even puny little rubella virus inside the mother's body. For most of us who've already been born, by far the healthiest way to become immune to these "diseases" is to have them as a child. I had the diseases, then I had the vaccine, and it happened to be a contaminated batch of vaccine, and I would recommend the diseases over the effects I got from the vaccine to anybody.
Only in 1985 was MMR vaccine linked to an especially virulent form of mononucleosis that made masses of young people ill for a year or longer. I had acute hepatitis, with cramping, nausea, weight loss, and jaundice, into 1987; I remained jaundiced and asexual through the late 1980s. People who had MMR vaccine in other years did not have that reaction. They had other ones, which Robert Kennedy has chosen to investigate and document. I'm not employed by him, although I'd like to be, and don't presume to claim him as an e-friend, although I'd like to do. I am as proud of him as a previous generation of Irish-Americans were of his late father and uncle. Click here to see why:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/nyc-mandatory-measles-vaccination-violates-ny-state-law-chd-challenges-legality/
But there are true anti-vaxxers--Orthodox Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, members of the defunct Lord's Covenant Church in which I committed my life to Christ in 1978--who believe that having any vaccination is wrong because it involves contact with extracts from other living creature's blood. In the United States they have a constitutional right to act on that belief without prejudice.
Then there are those who want to use a risk-benefits analysis. In connection with vaccinations I think Ben Carson's explanation of the RBA is valuable...
For what it's worth, Dr. Carson says that for most people the MMR vaccine presents a merely acceptable risk. I think if he'd had it in 1985 he'd feel otherwise, but I appreciate his explanation of the risks and benefits of vaccines anyway. I would renew my vaccinations, or encourage a child to have vaccinations, against a highly fatal disease for which a mostly safe vaccine exists, like cholera or polio. I would not recommend that most people bother about vaccinations for trivia like measles or flu.
And among the RBA crowd there's also a division between those who generalize about vaccines and diseases merely by pathogen species, and those who are interested and expert enough to make distinctions among specific batches of vaccines. Sometimes some people actually feel qualified to tell working parents, "Don't let your child have Vaccine A, which is being used at his school. Bring little Timmy to a clinic that gives Vaccine B, which is safer." If I were a parent I'd think it was worth the trouble to investigate these people's qualifications further before telling little Timmy he ought to have a vaccine, but sometimes they are right; if I'd had that MMR shot at Loma Linda University, or maybe at Radford where the high school guidance counsellor thought I ought to have been, rather than at Andrews University I might have had no side effects whatsoever.
Then there are further distinctions of opinion among those withholding our support from a particular kind of vaccination...I'm always irked by the simplistic "Vaccines cause autism" meme. The overdiagnosis of "autism" among children who do in fact have impaired vision, hearing, or mobility, and may be painfully shy, but do not lack empathy, ticks me off. I don't think it helps either those children, or the young man I once met who is likely to fall over if spoken to because sounds disturb his hypersensitive inner ears, to use "autism" as a synonym for "brain damage of any kind." Some vaccine reactions may cause fevers, which may either cause or aggravate brain damage of whatever kind. Some vaccine reactions may or may not do as much damage to infants as prenatal exposure to measles, mumps, and rubella, alone or together, might have done to them as fetuses. Much remains to be learned and although it seems obvious that vaccine manufacturers and government offices are suppressing valuable data, because releasing that data would create financial liability for the government that mandated vaccines, "Vaccines cause autism" is an overgeneralization that's easily refuted and unlikely to help.
But the pro-vaxxers want to suppress all rational discussion and just force social media to promote their (profit-motivated) position to the exclusion of all others! Which of these things just doesn't belong? "Pro-vaxxers call for censorship? Therefore they are wrong! What else is wrong with them? Why are they so UN-AMERICAN?" we need to be chanting in chorus, loud enough and long enough that Big Pharma denounces its own scapegoats and the accounts from which the calls for censorship came are deleted and purged. If they were stupid enough to use their real-world names, the corporate shills should have to petition the courts to change those so they can be considered for some sort of job, if only pumping gas, during the rest of their lives.
Feminism
Twitter showed a dangerous level of susceptibility to censorship, admittedly due to someone's personal emotional feelings, in caving to a demand that people who bicker about other people's "pronouns of choice" be banned on Twitter. I posted about that last year; no need to repeat that rant. So far I've not seen a huge surge of support for my own position that people who use the F-word (the other one, besides "Facebook") as a threat or curse should be banned from Twitter. I say that as a feminist. If Twitter refuses to ban anyone who posts that, then it should at least also protect those who may choose to post, in reply, "Well, snip you." Nufsed.
I've added more recently that, in addition to calling out those who offensively pat, pinch, or tickle young people (not always women), or call them by pejorative names, and whine "But there's nothing sexual about it! That's the way I touch or speak to my children!", feminists need to call out men who invoke the "She's Crazy/Stupid/Incompetent" meme. Any aspersion cast by a male on a female's competence should evoke a loud, long, shrill chorus:
"He's a fool, a sexist fool! Shut up, fool! Go home! Get out of social media! Whose son is this, and why did his mother let him out? The only worthwhile thing he has to say is 'I humbly beg your gracious pardon, Ma'am,' for at least the next ten years! Does he have a job, and if so why? Is he in college, and if so why? He's so obviously unfit to be among adults!"
This is, of course, a counter-reaction to the resurgence of sexist bigotry documented here...Tina Fey is very witty, but the problem is not actually funny.
GlyphosateAwareness (and its Live Chat on Twitter)
So perhaps that's why the glyphosate shills picked a typically female name for the one that whined on Twitter recently that "since we've got a way to hush up the dangerous anti-vaxxers on social media, maybe now Twitter can do something about the anti-glyphosate..."
I was in the middle of a celiac reaction when I read that, and if a real woman had been in front of me, saying that, I seriously doubt that I would have been able to ask her, seriously, rationally, and empathetically, what had caused her to spout such a toxic-waste idea. "Y'want censorship? Go to China!" would have been a reasonable thing for anyone who is not an aunt, a Christian, and a chat moderator to have said...but I felt something like the surge of real, violent anger, followed by massive depression, that can be a symptom of fatal but rare multiple myeloma when it's not a symptom of ordinary hypertension and/or celiac sprue and/or some other digestive system disorders. People who have that feeling can and do become violent. I would warn all readers against mentioning the mere idea of censoring Glyphosate Awareness in the presence of any Irish celiac. Violence is not what we need. However good it might feel at the time. The pro-censorship fools are the ones who need to be in the padded cells.
Well...Devin Nunes' call for counter-censorship seems sorely misguided. The trouble with mandating protection for two official parties is that a lot of issues are not being adequately addressed by either of those parties. Things like #GlyphosateAwareness are the property of either party, neither, both, or however other many other parties may be out there.
But I saw that Nunes was right about one thing. I'd wondered where some of my Tweeps had been lately, and some people might have wondered about me, before my Twitter activity chart took a nosedive. New Twitter has in fact rolled out a subtle form of de facto pro-corporate censorship.
It's called "Top view." Up to this year, when you opened a page on Twitter you saw tweets--from people you follow on your own feed, from individual Twits on our profile pages, from all users of hashtags on the hashtag pages--in chronological order with the newest tweets first. When you came to something that didn't make sense, you could scroll down and see it in its context. But now Twitter has started mechanically rating "Top" tweets, picking for you the one tweet you see above the first irrelevant paid ad, then the next few between that and the next irrelevant paid ad...and Twitter has indeed admitted allowing its paying sponsors to determine how those "Top" tweets are picked. It's not in order of their popularity with actual readers, as I initially thought when I thought defaulting to "Top view" was merely annoying and confusing. It's to make sure you see sponsor-approved content and miss those independent opinions that companies like Bayer may be paying to keep you from sharing.
Celiacs Are Not Alone
It's to keep somebody like a poor lonely celiac student in California from realizing that (1) true celiacs really are rare, and (2) we got our lovely market for gluten-free food from people who actually aren't even sensitive to natural wheat gluten but have pseudo-celiac or other painful reactions to glyphosate, and (3) if he, as a celiac, wants more food he can eat to be sold at his school, he needs to be using that natural alliance with #GlyphosateAwareness, because glyphosate-laced food may be gluten-free but it'll still make him sick, leaving him one of the poor duped celiacs who seriously believe that what we inherited is not just a gene that should shape our food choices but a horrible chronic disease that may or may not be helped by following a severely restricted diet and whining and wailing for more subsidized painkillers, or gene therapy, or who knows what-all...
I call foul. The celiac genotype in no way excludes other genes that really are lethal, and that we know less about how people might be able to live with. (Among other things it may be one of a combination of genes that, together, produce susceptibility to schizophrenia.) But those of us who did not inherit other, more lethal genes along with our celiac gene can be models of excellent health--when other people don't keep on poisoning us with glyphosate. Growing up celiac forces us to overtrain so, like the survivors of physical therapy who go on to compete in the Special Olympics, we can and should enjoy super strength, super immunity. I am, I did, and for many years I was the leading local model of those things.
On this topic I'm not entitled to clobber people with my opinions. Who needs opinions? I am entitled to speak the truth in thunder tones. I host the #GlyphosateAwareness chat because this is the topic I own by natural right of inheritance. From a Great-Grandmother Susan from Ireland whose long, miserable life ended at the age of 103 when then unscented gas leaked into her home, where she lived alone with a "modern" gas stove. She was living alone at 103 because (1) she was no fun to be around, if not complaining of one minor health problem then complaining of three others, and (2) she was, nevertheless, still competent to live alone. And her daughter, a rodeo queen called Texas Ruby, and her daughters, my mother and "Aunt Dotty," and I, and some of The Nephews and some of our cousins on that side, all look just like her. Faces considered classically handsome or beautiful when we're healthy, ugly and pitiable when we're not, identifiable in Mother's box of old photos only by dates or background items to determine whose photo is whose--the baby pictures aren't even identifiable by gender. Smashing successes in early life that ran up against chronic, intractable minor disabilities at age 30. Until I, the writer known as Priscilla King, broke that "old family curse." Dang right I'm entitled to enjoy a long and healthy old age, and even brag about it.
And, if a pro-censorship fool were to start spewing toxic waste here in the cafe, feeling safe just because s/he is bigger than I am, I'd be entitled to pick person up, carry person out, and drop person on the curb. Not to be violent, of course. Nobody has a right to be violent. Violence is a wrong not a right. But just to show that nature has indeed given me, age about 50, height about 5'4", the right to lift and carry more than my own weight...when really violent people are not making me sick.
I would know more about this than the poor fools and tools in the corporate lobbies. A lot more. I say it's time we acknowledged that the celiac gene is a rare gene, a trait, a feature...oh, like polydactylism, or having concentric circles of different colors in your eyes. There is no reason why the celiac gene should be more inconvenient to us than those other genes. People with two-tone eyes may waste a lot of time talking about a feature that's become old and stale to them, as do we, but neither they nor we need to waste time feeling sick. The celiac gene simply refuses to digest certain things as food. Well, every human body refuses to digest certain things as food. Nobody can safely eat rocks, or nails, or lawn grass. Celiacs can simply add wheat to that list and get on with our lives. If people agree that shared meals need to contain natural foods that don't contain wheat or wheat products, celiacs can even share meals with other people.
Instead of which we're being specifically targeted, for what can fairly be called #IrishGenocide, by corporations that want to tell you that "the science" means it doesn't matter how sick their very profitable products are making some people, since each of those people's reactions to glyphosate is, considered all by itself, so rare that "statistically" it's "insignificant." That is: only a few people (and dogs, cats--like my four kittens still suffering at home today--and rabbits, and birds, and fish, and bees) have pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate, although pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate are at least twenty times more common than true celiac reactions to wheat.
(How do we know this? Numbers! Those numbers the corporate "science" types want to ignore! When even in Ireland only 1 out of 10,000 people develops true celiac sprue, usually late in life, while in a glyphosate-poisoned world as many as 1 out of 4 or 5 White people, plus substantial numbers of non-White people, are "gluten-sensitive," that tells us something, doesn't it kiddies? And when those "gluten-sensitive" people are reporting that, in certain European countries where glyphosate is banned or used in a less reckless way, they can eat wheat without being sick...that tells us all we need to know. No more animals need to suffer to explain why this is the case. And if you want to know who deserves not censorship but actual jail time for committing acts of senseless violence, imagine how a pseudo-celiac reaction feels to a kitten who's not even developed the ability to excrete its bodywaste without external help...all that gas and no ability to... Hard time!)
Nevertheless, most people don't have pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate. Lucky them...maybe. Some people have sinus allergies, or other respiratory reactions like asthma. (I had asthma, once, after walking several miles down a freshly sprayed road; I don't usually have respiratory reactions to glyphosate. Most people exposed to large amounts of glyphosate have combinations of reactions, over and above their usual, default reaction.) Some develop skin rashes, especially after skin contact with sprayed plants or food. Some have kidney reactions that involve the nervous system and can include narcolepsy or acute fatigue. Some become paralyzed. Some have cognitive or emotional reactions. Some may survive long enough to develop cancer, which either kidney reactions or celiac-type reactions help to promote, or to give birth to badly deformed children.
I've watched a patient-who-doesn't-look-geriatric (who uses glyphosate, herself, and stopped speaking to me when I told her that was probably the cause of her lingering "complications from flu" she had years ago) come out walking like a 25-year-old model, inhale glyphosate vapors, immediately reel and stagger, become confused, and have to be guided to sit down until someone could take her home. (I wouldn't have presumed to offer that kind of insight to someone that much older, even a close friend, if the sight hadn't been so unmistakable and unforgettable and shocking.)
The celiac reaction to glyphosate seems to be the most common not because it is, but because it comes on fast, goes away fast, and is unique, not part of an overall reaction people have to lots of other things. When I stood in a crowd of mostly middle-aged and senior citizens who were exposed to glyphosate vapors, and observed their reaction, by far the most common complaint was that people who had felt fine and been enjoying lovely spring weather, earlier that morning, suddenly felt "old" and "tired." The younger set, observing the basic immune reaction that produces "colds" among their coevals, started theorizing about "something going around." There was also a lot of idiocy about "allergies" to spring flowers that hadn't been bothering people until some moron decided to spray poison on some of them.
That was the day I realized I was not alone, or even in a minority. Glyphosate is doing most people harm, in a wide variety of ways. Each individual reaction seems to be a minority...but the overwhelming majority of all life forms exposed to glyphosate, even at low levels if those levels are sustained over time, are showing painful physical reactions. We're now seeing smaller animals die out. Insect and bird counts are dropping into the danger zones. At the same time we're seeing animals that used to be considered hardy and easy to care for, like house cats, suddenly become fragile creatures that have to be nursed through acute illnesses almost every year. Vets are now classifying cats' recurring illnesses as losses of immunity to a virus, but very few cats lost immunity to that virus before glyphosate levels reached their current height! And we all either know that we feel more than ten years "older" than we were ten years ago, or know people who do, or both.
When I started researching the connection between my glyphosate exposures and my celiac reactions, I had some doubts about glyphosate causing birth defects in livestock in South America. Currently I have some reservations about the claim that it's functioning as a "xenoestrogen" unbalancing older people's sex hormones. I started the #GlyphosateAwareness chat because I'm sure that some of the allegations being made about the harmfulness of glyphosate have to be mistaken. But along came the Ramazzini study to show that glyphosate causes birth defects among the offspring of individuals who don't show painful reactions to it, themselves...I wouldn't be surprised if the claim that glyphosate is unbalancing people's sex hormones could be refuted. Neither would I be surprised if it could be proved. We need more real observations from unbiased people, and at this point I think we've seen enough animal studies and need to confine "the science" to reports from human patients and "anecdotal" observations of animals. We know glyphosate is harmful to all living creatures. What remains to be learned, about how and why it's been more harmful than we already know for sure that it's been, should be learned from those living with any effects that linger after the much-needed ban goes into effect.
Bayer: Crazy Like a Fox
And corporations like Bayer...I seriously suspect Werner Bauman and his henchmen, er um corporate board, are trying to divest their own assets and bankrupt Bayer in time for them to get out before actually paying any damages to the millions of people they've harmed. Their clinging to glyphosate, with their ludicrous trotting out of the Monsanto-approved studies that actually condemn glyphosate to scream "But it doesn't necessarily cause cancer," is...not something any serious attempt to market any brand could hope to survive. My guess is that Bayer is planning its own bankruptcy, the way my husband planned his bankruptcy when his ex's reaction to his possibly-positive test for prostate cancer was to ask for a divorce; Bayer executives are likely choosing their aliases, forging their documentation, and working on long-term visas or changes of citizenship, as I type.
I would like very much for this summer not to be another season of sickness for me and my close relatives, and death for our friends, animal and human, like last summer was. Even the #GlyphosateAwareness campaign is giving me only limited grounds for hope. But I'd like for more people to be saying this to the makers, sellers, and too-stupid-to-live continuing users of glyphosate products. One more summer like the last one isn't going to kill most of us--it's just going to make us angrier. And celiacs, though rare, are already angry, we're already Irish, and we're coming after you with all our celiac toughness. Start running to the rocks and screaming "Fall on us" now!
How do I know Bayer (and the other corporations lined up behind them) are going down, and know it? By their use of this "can't answer them, so make a lot of noise and try to drown them out" strategy. I never expected #GlyphosateAwareness to be the sort of favorite hashtag Twits visit daily, like #TortieTuesday or #ChooseCuteness or #GreenBayPackers. I expected most of my followers to show strong preferences for any and every other topic, which they do. Nobody--including me--enjoys #GlyphosateAwareness. Even when my body forces me to think about it, I personally feel better when I think, read, talk, and tweet about cute puppy pictures. But the enemy, the people who are actively making you ill and me sick, are feeling a need to censor this topic!
Well, WOO-HOO and YEE-HAAAA!
The Glyphosate Awareness chat has never seen a lot of traffic. Most of the people who've been personally invited to it have declined to post on this topic; I know some of them have read the hashtag from time to time, but never participated in the chat. This is as it should be. So why would a massively wealthy corporation even bother to suppress an unpopular, uncomfortable chat?
Because they can't answer one dang thing I've said.
We've watched them try.
We've watched them fail.
One really smart, cute young fellow, who I hope has abandoned glyphosate by now, tried drawing me into a very erudite discussion in French. Well, by now tout le monde sait que j'ecris francais comme une vache espagnole, everyone knows I write French like a Spanish cow, I mangle their lovely language...but actually, the more erudite a discussion gets in any of the European languages, the easier it is for speakers of the other European languages to read. Tweeps watched me beat the kid at his own game as handily as even Venus Williams could still beat you or me at tennis.
Then another French guy, who's still tweeting in aid of glyphosate but has stopped replying to me, tried to use the documents Monsanto used on our Environmental Protection Association, only without the bribery. We made figurative hash of him (though not a Twitter hashtag, because he doesn't deserve one) in a few hours.
Then a bunch of alleged farmers in Australia tweeted hate at us for a day or two. We took them down fast.
Then a pro-glyphosate Twit asked me to discuss glyphosate on a radio show. You're on, I said. I've heard no more from him. One day watching me smack down pro-glyphosate whines with indisputable facts was all he cared to see. I could destroy his arguments on radio, and I would, and he knows it.
Then Kevin Folta, who's actually respected in some circles--or was--got into it, and the poor nerd regressed so far that, in his confusion, he emitted an ad hominem (or ad feminam) sexist insult to Stephanie Seneff. He's still on Twitter but he's avoiding me.
So, when all else fails--if you want to build a corporate brand, you drop glyphosate like a live grenade, which it is; but if you want to destroy a corporation just as soon as you can get your personal assets out of it, you roll out a little money and call for corporate censorship!
Sinners, run to the rocks and say, "Rocks and mountains please fall on me!"
(Actually the misquote comes from the musical...whatever.)
And So, in Conclusion...
We are winning, Tweeps. We may be reeling and bleeding, but we are winning.
We need to share the good news; and because these corporations are interconnected and it has taken a lot of corporate funding to sustain the Internet, we can't count on the Internet to do it.
In the American Revolution, there was no Internet; people were widely separated from each other and spoke different dialects--and, in the case of Pennsylvania, languages! Nevertheless, plans and alliances were made by what called themselves Committees of Correspondence, people who hand-wrote and hand-copied letters to lists of friends. These lists branched out like trees and united a population of individuals who'd never seen or spoken to one another.
On Twitter, after reading Devin Nunes' helpful complaint and confirming that it's true, I asked yesterday whether we should promote Glyphosate Awareness by buying ads or by deserting Twitter. I woke up this morning thinking, "Neither, of course!" Here's a better strategy:
1. Right now, although Twitter doesn't make it as easy as it used to be to print lists of our followers, Twitter does make it easy to find our followers--in chronological order. Go to your profile. Open your f'list. Scroll all the way down through all 200 or 500 or 2000 of them (yes, Twitter will do that). Start working up the list, oldest followers first. Reconnect with each and every one of your Tweeps, even if you have no idea who they are or why they ever followed you. Make sure they know why glyphosate-related tweets may be suppressed on the "Top" view of any page (and Glyphosate Awareness may, for example, be suppressed on the "Top" view of the #glyphosate page). Warn them to make sure they read only the "Latest" version of any page on Twitter. Encourage them to encourage Twitter just to lose the "Top" version, altogether. Do this individually because, although Twitter is using the "Top" view to show people pro-glyphosate garbage instead of accurate Glyphosate Awareness, so far Twitter is not blocking our notifications or individual pages; we can still connect with each other individually--we're just being prevented from connecting at random, the way most of us "met."
2. In view of the amount of money that's been poured into schemes that rely on the use of glyphosate as if it really were "no more toxic than table salt," expect further difficulties. Not only could we be temporarily banned from Twitter; Twitter, or the whole Internet, just might collapse. Have a mail drop, and web site that displays its address, ready in case we have to move back to hand-typing (or even writing) letters to people we've never met. Start preparing to use those, because Bayer is going down, and it will go down hard.
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