Once you control the media the prospect of controlling social control media as well becomes seductive

"You want to infiltrate those. Again, there’s two categories. There’s those that are controlled by vendors; like MSJ; we control that. And there’s those that are independent. [...] So that’s how you use journals that we control. The ones that third parties control, like the WinTech Journal, you want to infiltrate."

--Microsoft's chief evangelist

Summary: Social control media has become the instrument of dictators; shortly after publishing this short and factual post about Microsoft and the OSI the OSI has, once again, apparently resorted to unjust censorship of its critics; we have good reasons to suspect OSI itself is responsible for a false report to Twitter, based on the timing

As noted earlier, Twitter had just suspended my account for 7 days for criticising Microsoft and the OSI without even contacting me first (it offered no due process). Of course the OSI or its allies would not be frank and upfront about the true motivations; they prefer to falsely pretend it's about COVID-19 and use that to flag criticism of theirs. If this isn't the worse censorship attempt, I don't know what is.

I'm astounded. Not exactly surprised, however, knowing how poor Twitter can be at "moderation".

So I accused them of using/exploiting the pandemic (COVID-19) to promote something harmful from Microsoft. That was many months ago. And now that I criticise them for something totally unrelated they latch onto COVID-19 to silence me for one week or more. I cannot even respond to anyone.

We suggest that readers of Techrights should contact OSI, and maybe Twitter to the extent feasible. Minutes after my account was suspended (about 10 minutes afterwards) the chief of the OSI tweeted this to me:



I could not even reply to him! And he responded to me hours after I had posted this, or minutes after my account had been suspended. It makes one wonder who exactly reported me. I contacted Simon Phipps on this matter and responded to Stefano Maffulli via E-mail

My reply: you give them a majority of your budget, in effect promoting proprietary software vendor lock-in.

I cannot even respond because you folks appear to have reported me to suspend my account. Which one of you misused COVID-19 to suppress a voice critical of Microsoft?

Clear and obvious misuse of "report" to suppress perfectly-factual criticism of an unpopular institution.

I've filed a (counter) report to Twitter:



They say it can take days to assess. Yes, days.

If not trusting Microsoft is "COVID-19 misinformation", then we're in seriously trouble in social control media, which I've warned about all along.

Twitter sent only an automated reply by E-mail:

Hello,

We’ve received your appeal request.

Our support team will take a look at the information you provided for your appeal. We will respond via email as soon as possible. Please note that while we review your appeal, you’ll be unable to access your Twitter account.

If you would prefer, you may instead choose to cancel your appeal request and resolve the violations by proceeding to Twitter and following the on-screen instructions to restore your account to full functionality.

Thanks, Twitter

The suspension (00:54) was about 20 minutes before the reply from Mr. Maffulli. So the correlation in times may highlight who's responsible for it.



Remember, kids. Don't criticise Microsoft and their facilitators (like Linux Foundation) or they will 'vanish' you digitally... like in China. ⬆