Tim Wellens loves the online game Elite Dangerous. So much so that he dedicated a poem to the title – and was promptly banned from Twitter for it.
One should be careful on Twitter about what one says. Apparently even in a poem about a computer game.
Poem leads to Twitter ban
What happened? On the day of the poem, Frontier Developments published a poem via the official Twitter account of Elite Dangerous to encourage players to respond in poem form.
This is a typical limerick, a 5-line poem with the rhyme scheme AABBA:
There once was a pilot from Lave,
Who wasn’t particularly brave.
He encountered a Thargoid,
Who he tried to avoid,
But now he’s one foot in the grave!
The Elite Dangerous fan Tim Wellens reacted and wrote his own poem:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Thargoid or foe,
I will come to kill you.
As a result, his Twitter account was banned. The reason: The tweet allegedly violated the guidelines which prohibit threats of violence.
Objections are not taken seriously
That’s why the player is angry: Tim Wellens explains that he is furious about this. Because he feels that the ban made him feel judged by a computer.
Even when he complained, it fell on deaf ears. Wellens believes that no human looked into this matter and that he was only communicating with an AI against which he has no chance at all.
Tim Wellens understands that Twitter uses bots to deal with the volume of daily tweets and filter out problematic messages. But he had hoped that at least after a complaint, a human would look into the issue and make a reasonable decision.
Because his tweet was not a direct threat to a person, but a reaction to a poem and “threatened” in that sense only aliens in a computer game or enemies he could encounter while playing. All of this had nothing to do with the real world.
Not an isolated case: The streamer Graeme Crawford was also banned from Twitter when he wrote on October 3rd in response to a friend’s video: “I will kill you when I’m not sick anymore”. Here, too, only bots reacted to his objections, and his account remained banned.
This is how the community reacts: Of course, these bans went viral. The community of Elite Dangerous shows no understanding of how Twitter reacted.
RMJ wrote on PCGamer: “The world is turning into a sad place.”
rep- wrote on Eurogamer: “Moderation on Twitter is a farce.”
Twitter must, of course, respond to threats and uses an algorithm for this. However, the fact that appeals are not reviewed by human employees leaves a bad taste for many.
