I managed to do what Donald Trump took four years to do. Want to find out how? Read on.
I have to start this piece with a disclaimer. This is not a political piece. There is no agenda. This is not meant to favor any of the parties. I voted for Biden in the last election. I voted for Trump before that and Obama before that. I can’t remember who I voted for before that. I vote on issues. I like small government and low taxes but believe education is a right and should be affordable. I also believe the everyone deserves at least basic healthcare coverage. Sometimes those issues favor one party. At other times they favor the other party.
This past year, 2020 has not been good. It started ok and literally ended with a bang (ok that was week one of 2021). As healthcare workers the COVID pandemic has been front and center. Not only have I tried to understand it, avoid and adapt but I’ve had to deal with the misinformation that has been widely disseminated out there about it. It’s real. It’s destroying sectors of our society. It’s killing mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, friends, uncles and aunts. Real people who had lives and loved ones. People who laughed, cooked, danced and shopped. It’s hard to fathom that every day we are losing more people that died in Twin Towers tragedy. Every single day.
When we thought things could not get worse (I have not mentioned the California wildfires and a summer of smoke and haze) the Capitol gets raided. There’s enough for you read out there without me adding it but it made me sad. Such a great nation. So divided. It’s not where we want to be but it was more bad news and doom and gloom to follow a bad year.
So last weekend I got bored. I was playing with Twitter. Trump got banned. I decided to add a little levity into things. I made a fake account. A fake Donald Trump account. It was a parody. A joke. Look at the splash screen:
Easy enough to get a name close to his original site. Easy enough to put fake glasses onto his picture. I even called it 007. The crowd in the background? Hockey crowd. Lots of Canadian flags.
I started tweeting. Started with this:
Kept going:
and going:
Got a few likes:
Got 10 followers.
Here are some of the best ones:
I was not inciting violence. Not promoting hate or bigotry. Just adding a little humor on what was obviously a parody account. I thought some of them were pretty funny!
Four days into it my account got suspended:
The reason is listed in a long list of Twitter no- nos. You can read about them here. had tweeted about 250 times in 4 days. Maybe I was spam. Twitter was kind enough to leave my true persona account alone (https://twitter.com/LaliSekhonMD). My profile was blank. My posts were gone. My follows deleted.
What did I learn? Well. There are plenty of Donald Trump parody accounts out there so maybe I just got caught up in the censorship. I wasn’t miffed. Just surprised. Here’s why.
Social media is optional.
All of it. We can opt in. We can opt out.
Twitter is not a Government body.
If McDonalds doesn’t want to serve me any more nd as the right of refusal, so does Twitter. This is not about our First Amendment. I am expressing my freedom to speak right here! I can put an ad in a newspaper. I can do podcasts. I can setup a website. I can do a lot. There are more options for me to express my free speech than there have ever been in the past 200 years.
Anyways, that’s how I got banned. We are going through troubling times. 2021 is not going to be easy. We are a great nation together but divided we fail. So what if Twitter banned me? The whole experiment was kinda fun!
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