I have been on Twitter since March 2012. It is
essential for my writing. Without Twitter and Facebook whatever I write would
be read by almost no one. Think of the situation prior to the Internet. If you wanted
to write you had to either work for a newspaper or magazine or try to write for
a publisher. The only realistic
alternative to this was to write for the equivalent of a parish newsletter.
Building an audience and a following takes enormous
effort. Don’t bother to start if you are unwilling to put the hours in with minimal
recognition to begin with. My earliest statistics on Blogger are from October 2012.
I briefly used another site before that.
I started with 312 views that month.
All through the years building up to the 2014
referendum I would get a few hundred views for each article. Then by 2015 I
would sometimes get a few thousand views a month.
It’s not much fun writing when no one reads. It
defeats the purpose. But if you are not prepared to be ignored, give up now.
Even J.K Rowling must have despaired at the hours she had put into Harry Potter
only to see her work rejected. There are any number of J.K. Rowlings, some
equally talented who never had their books published in their lifetimes.
But I kept getting up early on Saturdays to write my
articles and gradually my readers increased as did my followers on Twitter.
I have a simple Twitter strategy. I hardly follow
anyone. But anyone (within reason) who follows me I follow back. I think it’s a
matter of courtesy. It leads to embarrassment sometimes because I don’t have
time to check who I follow. I sometimes get messages from people who think I
might pay for naked pictures. But unless you have something on your profile
that makes it obvious you are undesirable, you will get a follow.
My other strategy is to block indiscriminately. Any swearing
and you are gone. Any personal criticism of me and you are gone. If we’ve interacted
before I might give you a second chance, otherwise not. I learned in the early
days not to interact with Scottish nationalists. I write my articles, but I don’t
have long debates with them. It’s pointless. After years of blocking my time
line is mainly free of Scottish nationalists and I can get on with promoting my
articles without having to waste time.
If you are writing articles without anyone helping you,
it is necessary to make them both interesting and original. If you are merely
repeating what is in the newspapers there is no point and you won’t get
anywhere.
To be original you need to be willing to be
controversial. I don’t put limits on what I can write except that it must
follow logically. If the logic takes me to a place where some people don’t like
so be it.
A while back I wrote about vaccines and some of my
followers were angry. I’m in favour of vaccination and find it difficult to
understand those who are not. Some people decided to unfollow. I unfollowed
back. I can only write what I think. You may disagree with me about the Middle
East or about Trump or about Tories, but you may later agree with me about the
SNP.
But the election is finished. I cannot keep writing
about the SNP every day. There must be new topics. You will disagree with me
about some of them. That is the point. Politely disagree by all means, but I won’t
necessarily respond.
Twitter is different when you have nearly 40,000
followers. I only ever look at the notifications. I probably won’t see your
tweets. It’s not that I’m ignoring you, I just don’t see you. So too I get
endless direct messages. Many of them are very welcome. But I can’t respond to
everyone who says Hi.
Don’t expect to make much money from writing. For years
I made a tiny amount from Google ads. You have to make £60 before they pay out
and I would count each trickle of coins until eventually I had enough. This
past year things have changed. I have been able to write more and the number of
my readers has grown massively. But I still make a relatively small amount. One
hundred thousand readers a month might bring in £100 pounds, but the hours
required to earn it amounts to maybe £5 pounds an hour, so if you want to earn
money you are better off working in Tesco. I don’t like to ask for donations as
I have decent job that pays the bills. I’m happy to share everything I write for
the free cost of a link back to my site. I don’t know how anyone makes a living
from writing. That’s a problem for writers, but it’s also a problem for
readers.
I am grateful to Twitter and Facebook, but I have had problems
with both. I share my articles to various Facebook groups, but once in a while
Facebook decides to ban me for doing this too often. Twitter decided a few
years ago that it wouldn’t allow me to post my blogger links so I had to buy a
domain. It was worth it anyway, because having your own domain helps a site.
But on each occasion trying to solve the problem with either Twitter or
Facebook was less than rewarding.
If you’ve ever tried to contact Twitter you will find
that there is no one to contact. You just get a computer asking you questions
and you end up in a loop. It’s not worth bothering. Find your own solution
instead.
Yesterday I found myself on the Twitter naughty step.
The problem was that I had told the truth.
Someone I didn’t know replied to one of my Tweets with
a question.
Why do you think Hamas fires rockets?
I should have ignored the question of course, but I replied.
To kill Jews.
This is self-evidently true. Hamas does fire rockets
because it hopes they will kill Jews. It may have other reasons, but killing
Jews is certainly one of them.
For this my account was suspended for 12 hours.
When faced with the suspension I was told that I could
appeal, but that my account would remain suspended until the case was decided. Alternatively,
I could delete the tweet, but in that case I could not appeal. I deleted the Tweet.
If I had appealed who knows how long I would have been suspended.
The absurdity of the situation can be illustrated by
asking the question.
Why did the Germans build gas chambers?
The answer obviously is to kill Jews.
But to suppose that it is anti-Semitic to give this
answer is ridiculous. In fact, to say for example that the Germans built gas
chambers for another reason, for example to kill rats, would be a form of
Holocaust denial, which would be anti-Semitic.
My tweet and the context in which it was written is so
obviously not anti-Semitic, that I begin to wonder at the crudity of Twitter’s
algorithms. Perhaps the phrase “kill Jews” is not allowed, for which reason you
might get banned for saying “It is wrong to kill Jews, just as it is wrong to
kill Muslims”.
Then again, I have heard that British slang for a
cigarette can get you banned as can the word for a Welsh meatball.
I have put an enormous amount of time and effort in to
building a following. It is disturbing to find that for something accidental
and absurd I might be banned. I think I am one of the politest users on Twitter,
but all that counts for nothing if the computer says No.
Someone should write a modern version of Kafka’s the
Trial, with Twitter as judge, jury and executioner. Perhaps I will.
But there is no point complaining. Twitter has its
rules and we must work around them.
I have decided I need a Twitter insurance policy. It
is a second account. It uses my full name.
@EuphemiaDeans
I would be grateful if you followed this account. So
that if Twitter decides to ban me again, I at least will have the means of
getting to some of you. If I can be cancelled for telling the truth, we all
can.
