I Got a Letter From Apple's Lawyers
This blog post comes to you in two parts!
Part one: I got a letter from Apple's lawyers. So about a month ago I received the email I was least expecting: a message from Tumblr Trust & Safety telling me that lawyers representing (the tech company) Apple don't like my Tumblr account. And it included a serious business legal letter from a law firm that defends Apple's trademarks. This might sound kind of scary, but from my perspective it's hilarious.
Okay, first of all, I barely use this Tumblr account, and I don't remember when I made it or why I made it. I only have two followers who are 100% bots. And basically there's only one active account I follow and interact with whenever I make my occasional visit. However, I had the username set to "apple-m1" and the profile picture being the Apple M1 processor logo, with the title being being "Airpod Shotty". I completely forget if I changed the username and everything to that or if I made this account this way, but yeah, this was not some account that anybody cared about.
I expected maybe some complaint if this was an active blog that had some follower engagement, but nah, somehow being a nobody with the above account info was enough to get lawyers activated. Also I had this username for a long time. Perhaps they might be scanning the world wide web for anything that might be Apple related? In the legal letter, it was a crap ton of hella verbose and long-winded legal speak that could have just been two sentences: "stop pretending to be an official Apple social media account. Tumblr, please delete it."
But... uh... em... it's just a barely active weeb reblog account, with the very serious title of "Airpod Shotty". How could anyone think it had anything to do with Apple, or anything to do with a very particular Apple product? The chances of anyone stumbling upon it were next to nothing as well. Apple's social media presence is also very minimal and heavily curated, with no presence on this "silence, brand!" platform as far as I know. And yet a very serious lawyer person representing a megamegacorporation took time out of their day to put together a long letter to ask Tumblr to get rid of my random account for violating their trademark.
I'm kind of pretending to be dumb, and I get what's going on. Companies must protect their trademarks, or they can lose them. It's a weird legal thing, but yeah. So to ensure nobody can accidentally think I'm actually a real Apple social media account, I changed the logo from the official Apple M1 logo to a poorly drawn MS Paint one. And I also changed the blog title to make it clear that no, this is not actually the official Airpod Shotty. It is now "Airpod Shotty (not official)". Though I have chosen to not change the bio/description "How the heck did you find this page?" that I set probably back when I made the account.
However, I'm also not changing the username. I apparently have the option to give my own legal response to Apple's lawyers, but I won't. This account doesn't matter, and I just want to see what'll happen, if anything. Is just the username enough to make the lawyers continue to complain? The ball is kind of in Tumblr's court now. Unless something actually serious happens I'm not going to provide an update here.
Part two: Mr. President, a second Hifumi X/Twitter account got banned. I'm shocked, devastated, depressed, my life is over! (Not really.) But I am a little bit frustrated about this situation. The first account I got banned was an account I barely even set up and did anything with before X/Twitter bots decided I was a bot somehow. But this second one I actually spent a lot of time using for years.
A lot of people complain about Twitter being crap, and it is, but it's totally possible with enough persistence to curate an experience that is overall fun and entertaining. And I somehow did it with this account. What I did was pretty much only follow, like, and retweet Japanese accounts posting vocal synth stuff. And then on the FYP, any accounts that were not vocal synth or other weeb stuff I muted relentlessly. Next, I made sure to mute any keywords and phrases that usually appear in anything I do not want to see. Finally, I use the Control Panel for Twitter extension to get rid of stuff in the UI I find annoying like the trending topics or "accounts to follow".
All that combined resulted in me often spending at least an hour on Twitter on average daily. Sometimes there would be some tweaks of the FYP algorithm, or I'd interact with some account that made the algorithm think I'm interested in stuff I am not that would throw things off, but usually either I figured out how to fix it, or it would go away pretty quickly. It felt low key bizarre reaching a point where on most days the only thing I did not want see was just art I was not interested in, with no need to mute anything... on the social media site people love to complain about.
Recently though I've considered getting rid of this account, and I pretty much "disappeared" by privating the account, removing all my followers and many follows, and setting my username and profile pic to be blank. However I was still visiting mostly daily because my feed is so chill. But yesterday-ish I made a normal visit to the Twitter, liked one post, went to do something else, and after some time I got an email that said someone reported me, and now I'm banned because I'm doing "inauthentic behaviours"??? I have an idea of who might have reported me (the one like), but I don't think they'd actually care enough to report me?
This account is in such a weird spot right now... I can look at tweets and accounts, but that's literally it. I can't post, I can't like, I can't retweet, I can't mute or block, I can't translate posts, and I can't search. All my bookmarks are gone, my following feed is blank, and I can't see what I liked or who I followed. Interestingly though, my FYP is pretty much the same, and I can still see what I've posted or retweeted.
Like I said, I was considering getting rid of this account, so this is more annoying than devastating. This account is a waste of time. A positive waste of time, but a waste of time nonetheless. I had some mildly interesting stuff in my bookmarks and likes, so I appealed my ban, but I'm ready to expect this account to remain banned forever. Now I'm wondering if most random accounts I've come across that were banned also got hit with stupid bans and can't recover. I saw Tsurumaki Maki's and I think Haruno Sora's official accounts get banned in some ban wave, and they ultimately ended up creating new accounts.
For now I'm probably still going to use this account because my FYP is mostly how I want it, but I expect I'll eventually reach a point where it degrades with me having no further control of the curation, and I'll have to pull the plug if I don't get unbanned. I still got one more account to play with, but if that also gets banned... I mean I guess I'll leave Twitter if they don't like me... okay...?
That's all I got for today, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Update: A few days have passed and unexpectedly I got unbanned from twitter, but it's still kind of weird. I took some inspiration from this tweet for how to word my own appeal message, and I guess politely explaining my situation worked? Although the unban message I got was basically a bot saying it looked at my account and decided I was not breaking the rules. I expected maybe a person to look at it, but looks like convincing a bot might be how it ultimately works. Anyways, I'm happy it worked out.