The Saga of Harassment by Way2Enjoy:
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(Last Updated 17 March 2023)
Only two emails were sent in early 2022, both ignored, however a decision was made to change his email from ‘file and mark read’ to ‘do-not-deliver’. Mr. Tiwari emailed again per the logs of the email system (do-not-deliver puts the email in trash automatically, it does not actually reject the email) and moved to Twitter as a location for ongoing harassment.
August
Starting on the 23rd, Mr. Tiwari began tweeting to people who work in WordPress, and know Mrs. Epstein with comments like how WordPress is only for the LGBTQ:
When these were pointed out to Mrs. Epstein, she reported them to Twitter as a hate attack based on her sexuality. The tweets were removed, however at the same time Twitter emailed:
After reviewing the available information, we want to let you know rstbiet hasn’t broken our safety policies. We know this isn’t the answer you’re looking for. If this account breaks our policies in the future, we’ll notify you.
Twitter Support
At that time, Mr. Twiari also began @-ing official WordPress twitter accounts, anyone who happened to mention WordPress or the (then) upcoming WordCamp US (the largest WordPress event in North America), and of course people he knew were connected to Mrs. Epstein.
For example, he called Mr. Mullenweg ‘psycho’ and ‘arrogant’:
Or that Mr. Mullenweg himself is homosexual:
As well as claims that only queers are allowed to use WordPress.COM and WooCommerce:
Beyond such comments, he also began to claim that WordPress.org had access to people’s passwords and could use that to hack someone’s paypal/gmail/etc.
Even if one presumed a developer was so ignorant as to use the exact same password on all services (which is an egregious security risk in and of itself), any WordPress developer of worth would know that they DO NOT have access to passwords. And certainly few people have access to the WordPress.org database in a way that they could access the encrypted passwords.
All passwords in WordPress (which is in fact what powers wordpress.org) are hashed (encrypted) via MD5 and also salted. This effectively means a human (nor a computer) can’t (easily) decrypt a password. In fact, WordPress the software doesn’t even try! They will take your password and repeat the encryption process to compare the results. If the encrypted password matches the saved encryption, it’s valid. There is no attempt to actually decrypt or make the password ‘visible.’ It is simply accepted as an unknown.
It’s also important to note that when a user is suspended on WordPress.org, their password is automatically reset. This means whatever his password ‘was’ at the time of his ban, it was immediately deleted and changed to something else. Thus it is categorically impossible for Mrs. Epstein to be aware of his passwords either in or outside of WordPress.org.
Furthermore, while it is plausible that Mrs. Epstein (and any administrator on WordPress.org) could re-set his password, that is only contained to WordPress.org and does not extend to any other site. In short, a user account in WordPress.org has no correlation to user accounts on external sites.
September
Many of those tweets in August were deleted, for reasons unknown, however as of 16 September, Mr. Tiwari had returned to his homophobic attacks:
Mrs. Epstein reported this post as soon as it was brought to her attention. Many other posts were made trying to determine why Mrs. Epstein was not attending WordCamp US in early September, as she had been scheduled to speak but had to back out due to unrelated issues.
Mr. Tiwari continued to harass anyone who talked about WordPress, if they were ‘notable’ or knew Mrs. Epstein, making claims such as calling her a “devil” though he mentioned her by name slightly less. Twitter has not responded to any of those reported tweets as actionable, which is expected. They care little for public safety.
It appeared Mr. Twiari’s new tactic was to follow everyone Mrs. Epstein does, or prominent people in the WordPress community, and @-reply to them to establish rapport. Since Twitter will not take action, even for comments such as calling Mrs. Epstein a ‘devil’ (see below), she opted to notify people who were being regularly @-ed by Mr. Tiwari about the situation and explain he was, in fact, her serial harasser, and it would be better to just block him and move on, as there was no historical reason to expect a positive outcome from any dialogue.
For example:
Most people have subsequently blocked him.
October
Abusive and harassing comments continued, though often not by direct name, with the same discordant and opposing communication styles:
On October 23, after the tweets continued and Mrs. Epstein tweeted a non-anonymized screenshot of a tweet where he called her out by name, and pointed out Twitter was going to do nothing, and refused to believe anything was actually harassment, even though she was called psycho and a devil, and claims were made that her actions were due to her homosexuality.
When other people attempted to point out there was no path back (note that Mr. Sieminski in the below screenshot works for WordPress.Com/Automattic), his reply was to again state that no one can question Mrs. Epstein:
There has never been any intended harassment towards Mr. Tiwari. He has not been contacted since 2019 and there is no plan to change that. However as his current actions are an attempt to defame and humiliate Mrs. Epstein, ruining her established credentials within the community, the collective decision was made to have this document public.
Anyone who’s tried to explain to Mr. Tiwari that he is over the line and unprofessional is called a slave of Mrs. Epstein. She has not encouraged anyone to address the situation with him, since she sees no benefit of viable outcome after four years.
On October 27th, the day after this article went public, multiple attempts to reset passwords on Mrs. Epstein’s websites (and to presumably log in) were recorded, all from the same IP range. The server itself blocked those attempts promptly, by design and basic server security.
Locked Twitter Account
In October 28th, some friends of Mrs. Epstein attempted to intercede on Twitter, explaining to Mr. Tiwari that his unprofessional behaviour had ruined any chance he would reasonably expect at restoration. To one, who recommended Mr. Tiwari investigate getting some mental health care, Mr. Tiwari aggressively replied:
This was reported by multiple people, including Mr. Dan H Gilmore (to whom the threat was made). The next day, Mr. Gilmore shared the successful result:
It was no surprise to anyone that it took the report of a cis white man of being attacked to cause action on Twitter’s end. There is no slight meant to Mr. Gilmore, but instead to the ability of Twitter and any social media to adequately protect minorities. What was surprising was that shortly thereafter, Mrs. Epstein and many others received notice that most of the reported tweets (many listed in this post) were, indeed, a violation and his account was locked until they too were removed.
Related, that same day, noted internet privacy advocate, Ms. Heather Burns, posted her own take on this saga.
November
By the 5th of November, Mr. Tiwari had removed the offending tweets and was permitted back. Since then, he as continued tirades against:
- Tumblr – for allowing porn (it doesn’t any more than Twitter)
- Elon Musk – for banning people (claimed YouTube never bans people…)
- Matt Mullenweg – for being “two faced”
Mrs. Epstein chose to set her Twitter account private, due to that and the new regime at Twitter. This was confirmed as a wise choice when she found the twitter account @James64586397 was spouting the same nonsense:
The homophobic posts were reported however given Elon Musk’s takeover, unlikely to bear fruit. Still, posts were reported and none have been made since 9th November. It’s possible the accounts were flagged for using multiple accounts to evade blocks, as that is a violation of Twitter’s terms.
Exodus
Speaking of Elon Musk, a number of people (Mrs. Epstein included) walked away from active use of Twitter around this time.
Legal Notice
Unknown to Mrs. Epstein (who does not now, nor has she ever worked for Automattic), a legal notice of some sort was apparently issued to Mr. Tiwari. He took to Twitter to vent:
As one might expect if they’ve read this far, Mr. Tiwari shared the screenshot of the email with many people on Twitter, and called Mr. Mullenweg a “psycho” and attributed porn on the internet to Tumblr.
He also told other people that all this was Mrs. Epstein’s fault, and she controls everyone and everything.
yes brother. i was expecting matt will help . he seems to be nice guy but he lacks guts. mika is dominating lady and whatever she says matt and folks at automattic cant counter her because they dont have guts
Tweet from Mr. Tiwari – 19 November
It remains clear there is no point in attempting to talk to him.
The next round of tweets was about how Tumblr was for porn, but also an interesting claim:
Avoid this guy. He will hire for 1-2 months then fire u. This is his all time fav game. And send u legal notice and theathen u
Tweet from Mr. Tiwari – 21 November
This puts a new light on the legal action mentioned previously. Sadly, Mr. Tiwari has made it clear that he will not stop until he somehow gets WordPress kicked out of India:
In that twitter chain, Mr. Tiwari was finally made aware of this document and subsequently deleted many of his tweets saved in this post (as well as offline for posterity), including the media “proof” of legal action.
This demonstrates Mr. Tiwari’s delusions include Mr. Elon Musk.
December
Mid December, things continued to unravel at Twitter (visit Twitter is Going Great! for an overview). Musk started using polls to make decisions (including allowing banned users to return, banning reporters who disagree with him, and similar such trivial matters. Throughout Musk’s unpredictable behaviour, Mr. Tiwari continued to ‘suck up’ to him:
At this time, Twitter banned the mention of other social media sites. Mr. Tiwari immediately jumped to reporting every single tweet by Mr. Mullenweg or the Tumblr twitter account as a violation to these new terms, even though they took place primarily before the ruling was made.
In between all of those spurious reports, he continued to blame his problems on Mr. Mullenweg:
As this history has demonstrated, he was not banned ‘just’ for saying ‘TRY OUR PLUGIN’ however he certainly was warned about this. Furthermore, he made it clear he wants this to be painful for Mr. Mullenweg:
And as somewhat expected, Mr. Tiwari continued to blame Mrs. Epstein and Mr. Wood (and by extension Mr. Mullenweg) for his “woes”:
While it may be flattery to assume that Mrs. Epstein possesses the talents of a lawyer, or that her personality is so dominating that anyone would fall prey to it, Mr. Tiwari’s statements actually give credence to his removal from WordPress.org. That is, there must be surmountable evidence to have justified his ban.
If you have read this entire document, you know there is evidence.
To be continued…