The oral history of Red Cup Rebellion’s Twitter incarceration

Last week something pretty weird happened. Our Twitter account, one that has been running for just over a decade now and has upwards of 27,000 followers, was suspended from Twitter because their trash website thought we were an 11-year-old.

Yeah, it’s totally our fault, but there’s still an indignity to it all that is both really frustrating and definitely amusing. And while we should perhaps be somewhat glad to have been liberated, even if only temporarily, from a trash website featuring trash people and their trash opinions, the trash levels of which are only surpassed by the trash of the galaxy brain Silicon Valley assholes who run the place, we still struggled to get by without the likes for a few days.

We’re junkies, and we didn’t know it until our fix was robbed of us. We are ashamed to admit this, but that is, afterall, our first step to recovery.

So here’s the story of what exactly happened last week, as told by Zach Berry:

The morning of August 2nd, 2019, a day which will now live in infamy, changed the Twitter landscape of college sports blogs forever.

Ed: Okay that’s already a bit much but, go on...

It was a day that the “Twitter man” tried to hold us down.

A day that the internet boogeyman lied in wait in the shadows of our proverbial bedroom, anxiously waiting for us to slip up.

The haters and losers, of which there are many, basked in the coded glory that was our disappearance and ultimate imprisonment on Twitter dot com.

It all started when we tried to help out our dear friend and Dutch uncle, Steven Godfrey, when he encountered a disgusting spiked seltzer in his home refrigerator.

Yes, we’ve chosen sides in the never-ending war of spiked seltzers, and it’s firmly with Bon and Viv. We will absolutely scrap over this. So, back to Zach:

After receiving the eternal gift of a retweet from Bon & Viv, we as a blog felt it our duty to give them a follow back to repay them for their gracious present. Upon doing so, Twitter asked us for a birth date since B&V are in the business of selling that sweet, sweet alcoholic nectar and before we could say “DAK POOPED HIS PANTS”, we were suspended from Twitter, ceasing all hot taeks and wacky photo-shops.

So it’s worth mentioning here that this is pretty standard practice. You can’t look at booze websites without “proving” you’re 21 years old, something I usually do by putting June 9, 1969 as my birthday (which is very funny).

But we—I mean, Zach—managed to duff it up.

The suspension stemmed from our blog starting in 2008 and when entering the birth date of this here esteemed sports and food and social commentary web site, we soon realized that we had outed as ourselves as ONLY an 11-year old online community. Obviously, we should be 21-years old if we are going to follow and take B&V’s alcoholic tweets to heart.

Instead of putting a fake (funny) birthday, he shot for an approximation of when we started this website back in the more halcyon Houston Nutt days. I get what he was trying to do; we all get it. It’s clever. It totally misses the point of the question, and missed the purpose of the inquiry which, again, was to follow a spiked seltzer account on Twitter dot com.

So Twitter thought we were 11. It’s against their policy (and maybe illegal?) for them to provide accounts to anyone under the age of 13. They thought that we, despite a decade of bad tweets and thousands of followers, were an 11-year-old human trying to see what cool new flavors those wild and crazy folks at Bon & Viv were thinking up next. This got our account suspended automatically.

Once this happened, we flipped the switch into survival mode, going through the proper channels of appeals processes, submitting three forms of official identification, and desperately trying to find an actual human who works for Twitter to speak with on the phone.

Alas, it was a lost cause. The bots have taken over the world, mind you, and we were stuck in Christopher Nolan’s darkest and most evil limbo, dodging Marion Cotillard’s cagey smirks and daggers thrown via her deep, dark stares.

Red Cup Rebellion

The weekend was so long and our community was in peril. They were desperately wanting the boys to come back to their metaphorical town, but we were at the merciful hand of real-life Immortan Joe.

Y’all missed us!

With our friends and family (please, still, do not slander them) begging for answers in an effort to return to normalcy, we took to the streets.

GUERILLA TWITTER SUPPORT WARFARE!

I was on a plane when this happened, by the way. I landed and, while waiting on a cab, figured I’d see what was happening in the Twitter mentions. I got an error message saying we had been suspended. “Cool,” I thought, “we must have BofA’d the wrong State fan or something.” Of course the real story was much dumber (which, again, involved our account wanting to follow a spiked seltzer account on Twitter after telling the website we were 11 years old).

Would you believe it if we told you that Twitter’s support system is shitty and bureaucratic and sterile? In that perfectly non-human way that only people who drink Soylent can design? Because it is!

We followed up religiously with their support email that was sent to us as an automated message after submitting our appeal and we constantly sent those same three forms of official identification and twittered our thumbs.

We even went and saw the summer blockbuster, Hobbs & Shaw, hoping that with the glorious time that passed that upon exiting the theater and turning our phones on that Twitter dot com would’ve relinquished their death squeeze on our #brand.

[sigh]

Three long, dreadful days passed and we began to wonder if anything would ever come of this and we would be able to reconnect with a family reunion of sorts before the 2019 college football season started.

And then, some time around midnight Central Standard Time, the wonderful news was echoed through Slack dot com.

Red Cup Rebellion

REJOICE! We were alive. Support got out the daggum paddles in the back of the ambulance and kick-started our daggum heart like we were Nikki Sixx himself. We had once flat-lined, pronounced dead, but here we are, back from the fucking dead and in your timelines once more.

And our only regret was getting in way too late on the dang 30-50 feral hogs meme.