"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:

The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened …

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.

Solidarity ☭ @Karlmarxhd

@samhusseini Sorry, I wasn't aware you've replied, the only way to see your reply was to come to your Twitter feed, in the reply section. This is a level of shadow banning I've never seen before. This is what shows up when you click "learn more" (you have to scroll a bit to get here):

Solidarity ☭ @Karlmarxhd

@samhusseini None of those explanations are true (you haven't protected your tweets, nor blocked me). It's just shadow banning.

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.