As some people may have noticed, this author has been suspended from Twitter. Because of this, this post will be more personal than normal for a non-VIP post.
As you might recall, yesterday we covered how Twitter has been ramping up its unjust suspensions, here and here. When we wrote the first piece, we were aware of four very dubious suspensions. As the day went on, we learned @dom_lucre was unsuspended, but that left three other people. And besides it being interesting as a story, we wanted to actually advocate for those remaining people so we thought that if we Tweeted directly at Elon Musk about the situation, we might get his attention and get these people unsuspended. So when Musk wrote about the suspension of Lucre, we wrote a Tweet in reply linking to the first article and briefly describing the reasons we were told why they had been suspended.
And apparently, that got our account (@aaronworthing) suspended. Yes, we were suspended for complaining about another person’s suspension. Here’s a screencap of the email they sent:
As you can see, it doesn’t show the whole Tweet, probably because verified users can write tweets that are longer than 280 characters. It doesn’t even show the words that are likely to have offended them. It starts by saying ‘Another said that if somebody was maliciously blocking her in traffic while she is trying to get a sick child to the…’ We don’t remember our exact words after the ellipses and we are not aware of any method that would allow us to see that Tweet, but it was something like this (with the new text in bold):
Another said that if somebody was maliciously blocking her in traffic while she is trying to get a sick child to the hospital, she would run them over. By the way, that is legal in many states, depending on how urgent the situation is. But check your local laws.
We are not saying that this is what we said word-for-word, but we remember specifically what the gist of Amy’s Tweet was. We also remember pointing out it was legal in many states as a way of pointing out that what she said wasn’t wrong, morally or legally. Frankly, we think Amy was imagining that the child is in a life-threatening situation, and, no, we don’t think any just law forces a person to wait politely in their car while their child dies in those circumstances.
Honestly, since when is it controversial to say ‘I value the life of my child over anyone else’s’?
And we also remember telling people to check your local laws just to cover our hindquarters. We might have even said it was known as the defense of necessity. You’ll see us speak more about this in a moment. While we hedged our language, we were taught about it in law school as if it is the law in every state. And it should be the law, everywhere.
(Off topic, but ‘Aaron Worthing’ is a pen name this author used to use.)
In any case, we were told how to appeal and we took some time to craft our answer and we are providing a direct cut-and-paste of that answer. The only change we made was to turn web addresses to clickable hyperlinks. Without further ado, here’s that text:
According to the email I was suspended for alleged violent speech and you cited a particular Tweet.
This allegation is false. I accurately described what I was told was the reason why another person was suspended, and I shared my opinion *as a lawyer* that what she said she would do would be legal.
By way of background, I am a writer for the website Twitchy.com, which covers stories related to social media, including X/Twitter, and I am a lawyer admitted to practice in Virginia (among other jurisdictions). Yesterday, I wrote a piece discussing several people who I believe were unjustly suspended. You can read it, here: https://twitchy.com/aaronwalker/2023/07/26/is-there-a-twitter-purge-in-progress-it-sure-looks-like-it-n2385736
Since then, you have restored two of the accounts that I complained about, but not others, so clearly you are suspending people in error. I wrote about that here: https://twitchy.com/aaronwalker/2023/07/26/we-get-results-two-accounts-have-been-restored-n2385760
At the time I wrote the alleged offending Tweet, you had still suspended three people where I considered the suspension unjust. I thought maybe if I could get Elon Musk’s attention, I could help get these suspensions reversed. Therefore, when Musk wrote about the suspension of @dom_lucre yesterday, I brought the issue of these other persons to his attention by replying to his Tweet.
In your email message you sent explaining your suspension, you do not include a full copy of the Tweet, so I am going on memory. But I recall that I briefly described what I was told was the reason for the suspensions of each person. In the case of one, @RantyAmyCurtis, she had communicated to me the reasons for her suspension as follows: There had been a viral video of protesters blocking the road (I believe in England) even as a woman told them that she had a baby in her car that she was taking to the hospital. Ms. Curtis said something to the effect that she believed she would be justified in running any person over she had to, to get her child to the hospital.
In our Tweet, I DESCRIBED what she said.
I didn’t say I would do it or that others should do it. I only described what she said.
And I also correctly noted that, depending on how much of an emergency the situation is, that such conduct would be legal in many jurisdictions in America. As I said, I am a lawyer, admitted to practice in Virginia. I am not blowing smoke when I say that it would be legal: I am giving you my professional opinion. We call that the defense of necessity and it means, in short, that you are not required to sit politely in your car while your child dies because someone decided to block traffic as part of a protest.
Allow me to illustrate how this is legal in case you are not clear on this point. For instance, this is what New York Penal Law § 35.05 (2) says on the subject of the use of force:
> Unless otherwise limited by the ensuing provisions of this article defining justifiable use of physical force, conduct which would otherwise constitute an offense is justifiable and not criminal when …
> 2. Such conduct is necessary as an emergency measure to avoid an imminent public or private injury which is about to occur by reason of a situation occasioned or developed through no fault of the actor, and which is of such gravity that, according to ordinary standards of intelligence and morality, the desirability and urgency of avoiding such injury clearly outweigh the desirability of avoiding the injury sought to be prevented by the statute defining the offense in issue.
That’s a lot of words for the idea that you are allowed to do a bad thing to avoid a worse thing. So, for instance, imagine that your child’s aorta had an aneurism that burst. This is not an entirely hypothetical scenario to me. Due to a birth defect, I had an aneurism in my aorta—that is, the main artery coming out of my heart was slowly inflating, and, like a balloon, it might eventually have burst. Fortunately, before my aorta burst, they caught the problem and, after open heart surgery, I am safe.
But I was told by my surgeon that if it burst, I would have a fifty percent chance of dying even before I made it to the hospital, literally bleeding out into my own chest. So, imagine your child (or anyone you love) is facing that, you are driving that person frantically to the hospital, and suddenly someone decides to prevent you from getting that person medical care because they feel like protesting in the middle of the street. Would you be justified under New York law in intentionally driving into that person if you had no other way to get to your destination quickly? Absolutely.
Let’s apply the words of the statute to those hypothetical facts. First, it would obviously be an ‘emergency measure.’ Second, it would be done to ‘to avoid an imminent … private injury’—the death of a loved one. Third, it would be happening ‘through no fault of the actor’ because there is no fault in an aneurism bursting. Finally, the harm you are trying to prevent must outweigh the injury you are inflicting on this other person and frankly, if you move slowly enough that person is likely to receive relatively minor injuries—at least, as long as we are talking about an ordinary car (a large construction vehicle is probably a different story). I have dealt with enough cases involving auto accidents to know this.
So, I shared my professional opinion that it is legal to do drive through such protesters in many states depending on how serious the danger to the child is. I also said something to the effect that one should still check your local laws—because I don’t pretend to know the law of all 50 states and the various territories America holds. On the other hand, this is a doctrine taught in the first or second year of most law schools and they teach it as being the law throughout America. And if you check the news, you know that many states have clarified their laws recently to make it easier invoke this defense.
Therefore, I am suspended, apparently, for 1) accurately explaining why someone else is suspended and 2) defending that person from their suspension by pointing out that the conduct she described is legal in many states (and it is). I didn’t say I did it, that I would do it, or that anyone else should do it.
Thus, Twitter has suspended my account in error.
And I will note that you have gotten this exact issue wrong before. Previously, you suspended a professor of law for saying something similar about what a person can do when protesters block traffic, as reported here: https://reason.com/2016/09/22/glenn-reynolds-the-internets-instapundit/
And the policies were supposed to be more liberal since Mr. Musk took over. He has indicated that free speech is supposed to be allowed on Twitter. Every word I have said is protected speech under the First Amendment.
If you insist that I must delete the Tweet, that is fine, though risable. But your own behavior in the past says that what I said does not justify complete suspension. The notion that I somehow presented such an emergency that you had to stop me from Tweeting immediately is wrong.
I thank you for your time and consideration. Feel free to write to me at my associated email address, or [omitted] or simply call me at [omitted] if you need more information.
Aaron J. Walker, Esq.
To expand on a few points in there, let us add a bit more.
First, yes, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame was temporarily suspended from Twitter for a similar statement. Our own Sam Janney covered that controversy at the time, here. We will note—without any unkindness to Mr. Reynolds—that his statement was closer to any line than what we wrote. His Tweet linked to an article about protesters blocking traffic and wrote ‘run them down.’ Reynolds was obviously alluding to the doctrine of necessity we mentioned above, writing on his own blog that
Sorry, blocking the interstate is dangerous, and trapping people in their cars is a threat. Driving on is self-preservation, especially when we've had mobs destroying property and injuring and killing people.
But even he conceded that his Tweet was poorly stated and prone to misinterpretation. So that’s a bit different than my statement that the law often allows you to do that. ‘Run them down’ is a world of difference than a professional legal opinion that it would be legal to do that in an emergency.
And to expand on another point, while being run over is not anyone’s definition of fun, we know from experience that hitting a pedestrian with a car is not an automatic death sentence—it depends very much on factors like speed and the size of the vehicle. We have literally been on both sides of this. This author once hit a pedestrian in our car and we were once hit as a pedestrian by a car, both times by accident.
Regarding the time we hit a pedestrian with our car, it was late at night and he was wearing dark pants and a dark jacket. We were not drinking if you were wondering: Due to a medical condition, we can’t drink more than what you get at communion. But we were going around 30-40 mph, and this guy thought he could cross the road ahead of us. ‘I thought I could beat him’ he reportedly said to the police. Due to his dark clothing we didn’t see him at all until we struck him. And for the record, we were driving a Saturn SL1—a relatively small car, but not like ‘Smart Car’ small. It hit him just as his leg hit the ground as he ran, and basically broke his leg and caused the other kinds of cuts, bruises and scrapes you expect when one’s body hits the hood of a car and a windshield, and then falls onto the road on the other side. The police determined he was at fault and cited him for jaywalking but we naturally felt terrible about it even as we knew logically this wasn’t our fault, because that’s how we are wired. We even sent him a ‘get well’ care package at the hospital.
And as we said, this author has also been hit by a car as a pedestrian, maybe five years ago. We were walking through an intersection and someone was trying to turn right and drove into us. That driver was coming from the same intersection and was going much slower (10 mph at worst, probably more like 5 mph by our very unscientific estimation). We believe it was an accident. The driver didn’t stick around and we never caught the license plate so we never heard his side of things. Instead, we ended up landing hands first on the hood of their sedan. We pushed ourselves off and yelled a few things at the driver that are not fit to print here. A specific obscene gesture might have been involved on our part. No, wait, we plead the fifth on that. But we weren’t hurt except maybe a scrape or two—we honestly don’t remember getting hurt even that badly, but we might have forgotten.
So we have first-hand experience with collisions between drivers and pedestrians in both roles.
Thus we feel confident that if we have a loved one who has a serious medical emergency and our choices are to run into a protester with our car and let our loved one die, the lesser ‘evil’ is to run into the protester. If driving at 30 mph can will ‘only’ break a bone, driving at around 10 mph is not likely to cause more than scrapes, but if our loved one is facing death, this is not difficult equation for us. So, if your child is facing a life or death emergency and you are driving that child to the hospital, and some thoughtless chucklehead tries to block the road, there is nothing wrong, morally, with driving slowly forward and forcing them to get out of the way. And, check your local laws, but it might not be a crime, either. And if it is a crime where you live, it shouldn’t be. You should always be able to value your life and the life of our loved ones more than some idiot who thinks it is his right to stop you for an illegal protest.
(And yes, these protesters are thoughtless. They probably thought ‘hey, if there’s a medical emergency and we hear an ambulance, we will move.’ We will charitably assume that they are at least that compassionate. The problem is that most of the time when there is a medical emergency, no ambulance is called. Why? Because then you have to wait for the ambulance to come to the location and then they have to take you back to the hospital. It is usually faster for a friend or family member to shove you in a car, and drive you to the hospital. Ambulances are called when transportation is not reasonably available (like if there is a serious auto accident snarling traffic for miles), or it is more dangerous to move a person than it is to wait.)
And to fill in one more detail, yes, this author did truly have an aneurism as described. We think a lot of people misunderstand the term. Now, this author is not a doctor, but by our recollection, this is how our doctors explained it to us. An aneurism is nothing more than when a blood vessel inflates. It’s not inherently bad, but just like a balloon, if it keeps inflating it is likely to pop, and it weakens your blood vessel as it gets stretched. And the aorta is the main blood vessel out of your heart, so if that burst, basically none of your body is getting fresh blood. It was caused by a birth defect in a heart valve (it’s called a ‘bicuspid aortic valve’ if you feel like looking it up), a birth defect which meant that the valve going into our aorta didn’t open as much as it should. And just like a garden hose when you put your thumb partially over the opening, that caused a jetting effect, which was causing the aorta to inflate. Apparently, this had been growing as a problem for all of our life and could have killed us at any time.
And to complete the story, fortunately, we did detect the aneurism before it burst by sheer luck—or perhaps because of divine intervention. We are always unsure if we should credit God with saving us because we know there are far more worthy people he didn’t save and that death is not the end of life, anyway. Still, we ended up having open heart surgery where they literally stopped this author’s heart. (Cue the lawyer jokes about us lacking that organ.) They ended up replacing a chunk of our aorta with some kind of synthetic sleeve and we have long since recovered. We are probably safer today than we were before the surgery. None of that is anyone’s definition of fun (however bad you think open heart surgery is, it is probably worse), but we are honestly philosophical about it. We don’t see this is as a bad thing that happened to us. Our attitude is more like we are thankful they caught it and thankful they could actually do something about it. From what we are told, fifty years ago, there would have been no treatment.
In any case, that’s the appeal we have written. As of this writing we remain suspended and have heard nothing in response from Twitter. We will keep you updated if that changes.
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