How Hunter Biden Got Me Onto Twitter

In my experience using Twitter, that massive social media platform, one can chirp without interruption, just like a little bird trapped in a big digital birdcage. Indeed, the cage is the addictive nature of the platform. Yet the real intention of Twitter was to provide a place for “real-time global conversation,” which is the description given by Matt Taibbi in his recent posts outlining a bunch of documents given to him by the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk. Musk wants us all to know why the platform, prior to his management, had censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, which broke in 2020.

I had my Twitter “birthday” in July 2009. I cannot tell you why I joined all those years ago. Good lord: those were the days of Myspace, the platform where – “where” – I once met one of my girlfriends. I couldn’t have “tweeted” more than a few times before giving it up.

Eventually I found my way onto Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg’s platform. Here – “here” – over the years, I would slowly grow a very small community of online friends. My Facebook friends find my dirty memes amusing, and they even occasionally read my diary entries. Many of them have kept track of my battles inside the family courtrooms, cheering me on as I fought to gain custody of my son. Why ever bother with Twitter? With a measly 140 characters, I couldn’t even post my chapter-length entries. So for all that time, I paid little to no attention to what was happening in the birdcage.

But for a while now it’s seemed like Zuckerberg has had it out for me. I’ve been given many 30-day bans. A lot of these were for nudity. Some were for “threats to violence.” Yes, I do think free speech entails my right to say that a politician should be tried for treason, the punishment of which is death. Of course, that’s only when it’s appropriate, as I think it is for certain men, particularly those whose last names rhyme with Sidan and Gauci.

Facebook doesn’t like this kind of commentary. I racked up so many bans on the platform that I wondered why my account wasn’t simply deleted, just as so many others had been. Indeed, I’ve seen countless accounts terminated over the years. How did my account hang on, even with all these month-long bans?

Nowadays, I like to think that my best and largest audience is a room full of NSA employees. I imagine them ruminating over one or two of my essays, which few others read, while they also get a giggle out of how close I get to posting the entire titty, areola and all. Sometimes, when people ask me if I work for the government, I say: yes…I just don’t know it, and I certainly don’t get paid for any of my hard work.

However, the limits of nudism were pretty clearly defined. Big titties under a shirt or in a bra, or a book covering my junk while sitting on a nude beach, would not usually get me a ban; and if it did, I would win on appeal. As for the Hunter Biden story, we now hear and read some detracting commentators – mostly on the left – who say that we appalled at the collusion between the government and Twitter are only upset because what we really want is to see Hunter Biden’s apparently huge dick.

Har har. Jokes on us. What a way to dismiss the entire story – even if the story did entail things like, say, a man using the same narcotics that his father and VP used to lock people away for; or buying prostitutes from entities that traffic enslaved women. These are not funny, but there is truth to them.

With regards to Hunter’s junk, I say “apparently” because – and call me a liar if you must – in all the sordid pictures I’d come across, I had never once seen an actual picture of Hunter’s penis. Enough searching eventually yields a few blurry pictures; after all, I don’t want to be the only shitposter on the internet who’s never seen it. Still, all the pictures I’d seen featured Hunter in his tighty-whities, maybe some sunglasses and a scarf, a drugged-out woman covering up the rest of him. Certainly nothing that would constitute “nudity.”

Why then, about a year ago, after the story was fully verified and most the pictures were out on the interwebz, did Facebook start giving me lengthy bans for posting funny memes featuring Hunter? This has happened at least twice. And more, I was also prohibited from sharing these memes with friends in private messages – something that’s never before been denied from me. (Indeed, nudes are a kind of currency in those DM’s, as some of us know).

What was so damn special about Hunter? Why so eager to embark on the impossible task of erasing him from the internet? Well, one can read Taibbi’s thread and make up their own mind. But that’s for Twitter, and I was focusing here on Facebook – my platform of choice. Talking to Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg gave his reason for initially censoring the story, stating that the FBI approached him and warned about the possibility of “hack and leak” material, which should not be allowed to proliferate. Zuckerberg complied, but added that some stories could still be shared, although I can’t parse out here which stories he’s referring to.  

But again, that was long before I started getting banned for posting memes featuring Hunter in his party suit. Why allow stories but censor memes – which were always allowed save for the tips. I don’t have an answer for this question. It remains a mystery to me.

So when Elon announced his plans to buy Twitter, I decided to try and make a switch, remembering that I had been part of the platform for more than a decade, and telling friends on Facebook to find me there because I was sick of getting “Zucked” every two weeks.

I’ve always said that Twitter sucks. It’s filled with bots, something Musk wants to take care of. And the platform still sucks, mostly sucking your attention, what with a constant flow of news, videos, memes, and bite-sized editorials.

It’s addicting, and it also allows for the posting of titties: hell, Hunter should be able to relate. In the few months I’ve been back on, I’ve had no problem sharing those Hunter memes. Perhaps the heads of the platform, even before Elon took over, had some guilt in censoring the story in the first place.

KM Patten is the Arizona correspondent for Stairway Press. Through his activism and essaying, he tries to keep his new state free. An anarchist in the tradition of William Godwin, Patten has published one book, Indictments from the Convicted, and two booklets, Staying ON During the Great Reset, and In Favor of Hatred.