Twitter bans toon-fur in pseudo-violence crackdown

Toon violence is a strange form of affection within the community of toony furs. Dropping anvils, hitting people with mallets, or slamming someone with a meringue pie are all par for the course. However, recently this community has found that the machines overseeing them cannot discern this toony culture amongst the social media landscape. Confused algorithms have recently started to take the violent jest seriously.

This was found out by a toon furry by the name of Aster in late 2021 as Twitter suddenly brought down the hammer to his account. With no warnings, or any form of communication, the toon bunny character found himself unable to access the social media of choice of most furries on December 7th, 2021. Aster himself is quite a prolific tweeter stating he believed himself to have made one hundred and two hundred tweets within the last few weeks before his account’s termination.

There was one tweet that Aster believes to be the culprit - one he made at a roommate at Midwest FurFest, where he said “I will literally jump across this bed and choke you”. It must be noted Twitter did not go about handling this tweet with the tool telling the user to delete the tweet to regain access to the account that they would usually do with these sort of situations. They sent this toon fur’s twitter account straight to the dip.

As those with a fondness of the English language would note, being artisanal with the word literally by making it literally match the definition of figuratively is going to cause unneeded and possible harmful ambiguity. Now we may have our first casualty of this on social media, where a private algorithm has decided to disable a user permanently from their platform due to the user’s figurative use of the word literal. Now imagine if a government decided to literally read a figurative literal as a literal literal.

As of this moment, no one from Twitter has responded as to the actual reason they were banned. In its swift and decisive action, it has sent a harsh lesson about the figurative literal. Don’t use it. It’s not worth the risk of accidental or purposeful misinterpretation.

In reaction to Aster’s ban, furries are trying to get the account restored with the hashtag of “#FreeAster”, however there has been no signs that Twitter will reverse their course in the decision of this matter. Regardless if the campaign is successful or not, it is important that toon furs know the risk they take when they make faux threats of violence on public social media platforms. For now, drop the pianos in Telegram instead.