"This Tweet Is Unavailable" -- Musk Escalates Shadowbanning
While some accounts are being brought back, Musk's Twitter is escalating shadowbanning for at least one user: Me.
I’ve spent much of the last few weeks trying to critique Twitter on Twitter.
My crit of Elon Musk’s version of Twitter is quite different from that of the “liberals” and “progressives” who are deriding him for exposing how the prior regime shadowbanned people. Or pretending that it doesn’t matter.
I actually called on him to do that.
In my piece of Nov. 22 — “Elon Musk's Establishment Retrench and How ‘Freedom of Speech, but not Freedom of Reach’ Targets the Freedom to Hear” I wrote:
In fact, one radical thing that Elon Musk could do right now is to disclose any communication between Twitter and the U.S. and other governments regarding the silencing of various voices.
On Nov. 28, Musk announced:
Since then, I have pushed for complete disclosure not just of what might be politically convenient for Musk or the journalists he has given these documents to, but in a comprehensive way so as to better defend free speech and the rights of the public.
I’ve long figured I’ve been shadowbanned in some ways on Twitter. But now that seems to have escalated in ways that I have not encountered before.
For example, here’s me responding to a recent tweet by Musk:
But several people have told me that that tweet isn’t visible to them — they get “This Tweet is unavailable”. And only see responses to it:
Similarly, when I responded to a tweet by Matt Taibbi thus and Terrina responded:
Other people just get her response:
As Solidarity noted, Twitter claims that the “Tweet is unavailable” should appear if there are “Tweets with limited visibility”: “There are some instances when a Tweet is unavailable to view, such as a Tweet from an account you do not follow that has protected Tweets, if the account has blocked you, the Tweet was deleted, or if the Tweet is from a deactivated account.”
None of those apply to me.
If I go to another account and search on one of my tweets, like the one atop this article that replied to Musk, it doesn’t come up:
So, this page, brought to my attention by Dr. ZW, may well be accurate:
The other day Twitter demanded that I re-login. It even told me a few times “Sorry, we couldn’t find that user” —
So, at this point, it’s hard to know what I’m tweeting that’s visible to others, so here’s a sampling of some of my recent crit of Twitter that Twitter seems to be hiding. Actually, this one seems to be the last one that got any substantial number of RTs and may have gotten under our tech overlords’ skin as it debunked a central part of Musk’s narrative:
I continued:
Glenn Greenwald from what I’ve seen has only been out to deride “liberals”, which is legit, but not scrutinizing Musk at all, which is pathetic: (Added: A reader tells me that Greenwald did an entire video calling out Musk for suspending Kanye/Ye. I don’t think this exonerates Greenwald’s stance on all this, at all but it should be noted.)
Musk bringing in the anti-Palestinian Bari Weiss did rightly set of some alarm bells in some circles. I noted:
If Musk were at all serious, he would bring in lawyers who were openly critical of Big Tech-government collusion of last year, whom I have interviewed:
Typically when I reply to a tweet and come back to it later, my response is the first one I see. I noticed lately that that sometimes is no longer the case. This makes it hard to search on even my own tweets from my own account at times. Some of these constraints make Twitter increasingly unusable, which may be the point.
This morning, doing more testing on simple scenarios I responded to Tim’s tweet:
But when I view Tim’s Tweet from another account, my response is not there at all:
Image is from Paul Klee’s prophetic Twittering Machine. Prior version of this article.
I have a friend who signed up after Musk took over Twitter. She was “permanently suspended” without warning or explanation within 10 days. 😂 She had a handful of followers and made fewer than a dozen benign comments in total (she showed me her permanently suspended feed at tennis last week). Her five appeals have gone unanswered. No explanation has been given for permanent suspension. No warnings. No notice. She was permanently suspended after liking and retweeting a project Veritas story about the kids being exploited after crossing border, and she had not made any comments at all in days, but remains entirely unsure why she was permanently suspended. Larger accounts might be coming back, but it appears from her and a few other anecdotal stories I’ve heard that old habits die hard.
The same censor loving people still work at Twitter, just fewer of them. I wish Musk well but Twitter isn’t for me. It was a manipulative 💩 social media before Musk. If PayPal is any indication, it can easily become that again once he’s not involved on a daily basis, and that assumes he’s able to push aside the totalitarians for any period of time.
The more I look into it, I see that there are so many people who were banned for life and never given a reason. Many before this narrow window of 2020 to the present that Taibbi concentrates on. After the announced "amnesty" I began to look into whether I might find any of those I followed or who followed me--about 3,000 each way--and can only find a handful so far. Wow. There were surely mass bannings before this period that they are reporting about. My ban was in November 2019 (after 11 years of not even a suspension) and no reason was ever given despite asking back then and lately. This reporting so far looks to be a limited hangout. How far back does this policy of acting on the advice or orders of the various government entities go? Why are so many still wondering why they were banned? Taibbi says the FBI, CIA, etc, would send lists and suggest Twitter to should look into even confirm terms of service violations, as if the govt entity had violations in mind-what was going on? should So far people who have been so prominently unsuspended were given the absolution of not having violated the terms of service. No actual amnesties seen, 'your violations are forgiven/forgotten' "please allow 24-48 hr for your Followers and your follows, whatever, to be restored". Yep, so far this is bogus