Yeah, I know.

Gen Z is all over it, but so are many of my friends, so I got drug into it.

Ironically, though, one of the videos that I took of Bub — him sitting on the couch, shirtless but wearing a short, playing with his iPad for a few seconds — was flagged by TikTok as violating community standards (the new way to say ToS, I suppose… TOS? ToS?), and I attempted to appeal it because it’s a short video of a shirtless boy sitting on the couch. TikTok upheld the claim that it violated community standards over minor safety, even though all of my friends who saw the video or the screenshot of the video agreed with me that TikTok erred in whatever assessment this was. (And yes, I was aware that I needed to charge my phone…)

Twitter actually responded to my support inquiry and immediately unlocked that account.

I say “that account” because I made a new one, and I’m just going to keep the new one. Truth be told, I am actually impressed that Twitter responded to my support inquiry to begin with because of everything you read where people Mention them asking them to look at suspension appeals, to please read their tickets… and a lot of these requests seem to languish. I’ve heard that it’s not uncommon for them to ignore suspension appeals or tickets for up to a year after they were initially made, even ones that were placed in good faith addressing actual problems. They just seem to get lost in whatever black hole they wind up in because it’s like they have more appeals and inquiries than they have people on board who are able to sort them out, although — as I’ve stated — part of that may be attributable to COVID-19 if not worsened by it.

Facebook’s just as bad, if not worse. It seems like the only time you can actually interact directly with Support (and this isn’t even that directly to begin with) is when you have to confirm your identity or request a change in name, even — especially — if they don’t like what your name was to begin with because someone reported you. I used to have my first and middle name as my Facebook “name”, and I had it that way for the longest time until someone actually reported me to Facebook for using a “fake name” and I had to scan in and send them a copy of my driver’s license so that they could “reinstate” my actual name. Never mind the fact that I had my name as I did because I am a survivor of domestic violence and stalking and the man who did these things to me has been confirmed to have multiple accounts on Facebook, apparently easily abandoning them to make new ones. A restraining order without end date is bundled into our child’s custody order, and he has no access to our child. There has been proven, willful disobedience on his part, and yet I am no longer allowed to make my account unsearchable — that used to be a thing on Facebook that you could do — or use a name that he might not be able to find. At least on Twitter you don’t need to use your real name. You are not obligated to provide your real name or to have it on display as a condition to sign up.

Not too long ago, my Twitter account got put under a “temporary restriction”.

When I tried to have Twitter call me with the verification code that their site insisted they had to call me with to deliver, the call continually dropped out no matter what I did. I could never get the complete code on each of the attempts that I made. It eventually got to the point where I could no longer request calls to be made to me with this verification code, so I put in a support ticket to Twitter that has, so far, gone unanswered. I’ve been hearing a lot of bad things about Twitter’s support system, though, so this might take awhile to fix… assuming, of course, that they answer the support ticket. I’ve heard a lot of things about support tickets with valid concerns going unanswered(, and that seems to have been made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic).

If they could e-mail or text me the verification code, that would probably work a lot better, which I asked them to do when I made the support ticket to begin with. I don’t know why they chose the option to have to call me with it, especially when the calls continuously dropped out. Twitter is like Facebook in that successfully contacting support can be, and generally is, difficult. There is no direct way to contact either of them, even though Facebook appears to have its own page (“Facebook”) and Twitter has a support account on their site. These things don’t seem to be monitored to the extent that addressing specific concerns on them yields results, though. And they should be, because it’s a shame to let potential like that go to waste. Even if a lot of people comment on them or Tweet to them, which they already do, it would be a lot easier to solve problems on each of their sites if they could more easily be contacted, especially in these manners…

I digress. Maybe I expect more out of modern-day social networking sites than I really should. I don’t know.