I've been hearing rumblings for a while now that Twitter has been unfollowing people from anti-establishment accounts, and some of my readers have told me they've been unfollowed from me, so I've been keeping an eye on it but my follower account appeared to be growing normally. That changed about 36 hours ago as of this writing, when I came back from an absurd week-long suspension for calling a group of people "stupid" and "dumb" who had tagged me in a post calling me a Nazi.
Now, this has been going on with Facebook for months already. My Facebook page following, which used to add many people every day, has been frozen on the same number of followers for days now as people are automatically unfollowed as fast as they follow. This phenomenon is common knowledge among dissident voices already; Lee Camp of Redacted Tonight tweeted in January, "In case anyone wants to know how Face book suppression works - I have 330,000 followers there but they've stopped showing my posts to many ppl. I used to gain 6,000 followers a week. I now gain 500 and FB unsubscribes ppl w/out their knowledge - so my total numbr never increases."
This has been happening on Youtube as well, with crucial anti-establishment voices like Jimmy Dore reporting that people are being automatically unfollowed from their channels.
Now it looks like it might be happening with Twitter as well. I'm just going to lay out the evidence I have so that everyone has access to the information and can piece together what's going on. We already know that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will brazenly lie to us about his site's censorship practices, since he got caught lying about censoring the #DNCLeaks hashtag in 2016, so we've got to share information and figure out what's going on for ourselves. It's important for us all to put as much information out there as possible.
While Facebook has been throttling my following for ages, my Twitter following has always grown unimpeded ever since I started using it regularly to share my work and ideas. Even when I was suspended for a week I added somewhere between 100 and 200 followers. Ever since I came back, though, my following has been kept steadily between 26,855 and 26,858. I keep getting notifications of new followers, and when I look I see those new followers are indeed there, but for the last 36 hours my numbers haven't increased with the new followers added, which makes me suspect that people are being unfollowed as new follows come in in order to slow or stop my growth on social media.
This could all be a temporary fluke, but it's definitely a big change from what was happening, and it's definitely not just me experiencing this; I tweeted about it asking if others are having the same issue and received a ton of answers in the affirmative. Check out the responses in this thread if you're curious.
Anyway, here's what I've got. I took a bunch of screen shots, then took screen shots of those screen shots so you can see the time in which I took them. Don't make fun of my weird sleep patterns.
So at 6:38 PM last night, when I hovered my cursor over my number of followers I got 26,858, which the display rounds up to 26.9K.
Hello, new follower in my notifications two minutes later! It always displays the newest followers on the left; when I hover my curser over the account on the farthest left I get this Walton guy here, and when I check the "followers" section on my account he's on the top left where he should be. This will all be familiar to regular Twitter users; I'm just laying this out for people who don't know their way around it very well.
But check out what happened when I checked my follower count twenty minutes later:
What the hell?
At 9:39 PM I got another notification about this new follower, who when I check my followers list appears to the left of the Walton guy. But when I check my follower count:
Why isn't it going up?
Again, at 11:55 PM, two new followers:
And what happened to my follower count? It went down one.
Crap, make that two:
Let's check my notifications again at 3:56 AM (don't make fun):
Ooh! Lotsa new friends! When I check my followers list, I can see the last guy who followed on my last count in the bottom-right corner, with eight new followers added since he joined:
But what happened to my follower count? Increased by only three.
After adding a total of twelve followers since I started counting, I'm back to the same number of followers as when I started counting.
Oops, make that one less.
This has never happened to me before. My follower count has always immediately risen in proportion to my new followers. I've always gained followers steadily, losing a few here and there, gaining large numbers suddenly when I do something particularly awesome and losing large numbers when I say something particularly controversial. Never before have I gained followers steadily with my numbers being kept around the same point.
Again, readers have told me that they've been unfollowed from me in the past against their will:
And it's still going on this morning. I've added 14 followers since my last count (26 total since I started counting), but it only has me up six from when I started counting.
So that's really weird. Twitter appears to be doing what Facebook and Youtube have been doing in the wake of increasing demand that they make changes in the way their platforms operate “to prevent the fomenting of discord,” as they were asked to do on the Senate floor a few months ago.
Or maybe they're not? Who knows? Maybe there's some other explanation. All I know is that this has never happened to me before, that other people are complaining about the same problem, that Jack Dorsey lies about Twitter's censorship of anti-establishment material, and that we all benefit from sharing this kind of information with each other. So for any journalists or anyone else out there trying to piece together what's going on, here's what's going on on my end.
I encourage everyone to share the details of their fishy censorship experiences using screen shots with time stamps as I have done here. These bastards won't tell us how they're manipulating us, so we've got to figure it out ourselves.
Remember: in a corporatist system of government, where there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and government power, corporate censorship is government censorship. It is not okay for them to do this to us. It is not okay for them to stop people from communicating with each other about the powerful forces which rule them. Keep fighting.
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Yeah, this is almost dystopian in a way. Group think is so powerful ppl have no idea how hypocritical they are. They're fast to call ppl they don't like "alt-right" or "Nazis", yet they somehow are able to justify to themselves that censorship is OK.
We're noticing the same trend...
So are we at Activist Post they have banned AP links from Twitter only a few RTs here and there others have told me they can't reply to my stories on Twitter absolute fucking insanity..
Which is why I set out to help create another social network onG.Social a network like Steemit that pays u for ur content plus encryption and other crypto related things. Except is more Facebook and Twitter like Steemit. Which I would compare Steemit to a paid version of Medium or Blogger.
fb you tube and twatter are not social media, or businesses.
They are social engineering.
The sooner these sites are made redundant, the better.
Communist ideology and its implementation is under way...same tactics, different technology.
Might surprise you but communism isn't the only authoritarian ideology out there. I agree on your other points. Communism is known for the perks for the ruling class but communist societies never had the income and wealth inequality present in our current system, which is a plutocracy that is becoming more authoritarian.
If there are no free markets, all roads lead to communism ...
you might enjoy this...
https://steemit.com/blog/@lucylin/stopping-the-comunism-in-the-west
Reads more like a defence of plutocracy. Central reserve banks are useful, it depends on what ends they are directed to achieve. I think what you resent about them is that they are the means to price the property of the collective. Ideally, if capitalists raise their prices too much, up goes the money supply to dilute their profiteering and support those put at a disadvantage by the profiteering. Yin and yang if you like. Why would you want to deprive the collective of the means to price the collective asset base? Sounds a bit one way to me.
You might want to learn about the Citizen's Dividend proposed by Thomas Paine, as this is the concept preceding a universal basic income. Our ancestors worked hard to build our societies and they didn't do it so our profit generating assets could be privatised for a wealthy minority to enjoy the exclusive benefits derived from these assets. They are always said to be run down, there's debt or any other reason that these assets would be better for all if exchanged for a one off (always low) price for the loss of the income stream along with the discretionary pricing power that comes with them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_dividend
Did you specifically join this site as an attack dog against anyone who questions the RT narrative?
Last week Twitter banned my account. i sent appeal form and got instant email back saying. don't try to contact us anymore, your account is permanent closed.
I had 5000 followers and all of them were from the crypto world. i wasnt spamming, i didn't do anything worng. I had that twitter account since 2009 and had a total of 900 tweets.
I noticed this happening as well! Thank you for laying it out there with screenies and everything from random times of the night. (I don't judge!)
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Have they implemented a secret quota system??
Yes... something's definitely not right, Caitlin. I don't have a large following on Twitter, but, still, I've noticed how I can't seem to grow above a certain number, even though I see new people following me most every day .. And I, too, have been surprised at the increasing instances of not getting notified when people respond to my comments. Last night a rather new thing came up on YouTube. I experienced a discrepancy with the viewer # on my screen while participating in the important Q&A Live Stream on#BeingJulianAssange with Suzie, Elizabeth & Kim. At one point, Suzie proudly noted that nearly 500 viewers were participating, while my screen reflected an unbelievable 125 viewers. The nearly 500 viewers did get reflected on my screen when I re-watched it this afternoon, but overall, I'm feeling concerned, that whether it's Twitter or YouTube, they can violate our screens (together or individually) in order to minimize our growing momentum or message. Like you, I hoping these are flukes but will start documenting and continue sharing.
It seems like a lot more people have been posting about being Zucced/thrown in "Facebook jail" lately too, and of course they never get any explanation why.
The UK government has escalated tensions with a nuclear power based on far less evidence than this! Using current UK investigation standards you have a watertight case. It does smell fishy though.
Yep, it's been happening to me.
My follower count is not allowed to reach 600.
I even asked people to just temporarily follow me to see if it is indeed occurring. Within minutes of someone following me, I lose 1-2 followers, and this has happened about 20x now in the last week or so, now that I am testing it.
Been at 591-595 followers for 3+ months.
An appropriate frame for these Twitter observations is Yasha Levine’s new book on the history of the Internet, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, which Caitlin referenced in an earlier column. There are several good podcast interviews with Levine while he was making the rounds promoting his new tome, and each has its virtues. There’s This is Hell, Radio War Nerd, and Behind the Headlines for starters, but I think Levine was most forthcoming and insightful on Media Roots.
Levine’s argument, which is based in a close reading of the history of the Internet’s construction, is that it was set up for surveillance. What we have come to regard as our right and freedom is looking at the internet through the wrong end of the telescope. Our ability to access information freely is the by-product, not the goal, of a series of technological advances that were funded and developed in order to give the government, the armed forces, and law enforcement agencies, a more enhanced an accurate facility to survey populations, be more effective during wartime, and have a greater capacity to manage and control the population in terms of domestic dissent and potential upheaval.
From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that Twitter is trimming the wings of its followers. It sounds from Caitlin’s description as though they’ve developed an algorithm which is meant to detect followers who are less than enthusiastic or active, and who therefore might not notice if the targeted feed was casually removed. That the algorithm sometimes errs and Caitlin gets protest messages from those who have been surrepitiously removed from her followers list, seems the most parsimonious explanation for the phenomenon. If true, it is a form of censorship or control. But since the internet was created to control, should we be surprised or aggrieved?
We felt that Twitter was our friend, a friend who was helping us to connect to other friends and people we’d like to think of, however fantastically, as our friends. In exchange for giving us this feeling of faux friendship and easily digested conversational bits to support that fantasy, we get in exchange circumcision, if the topics of our tweets stray too far from the accepted narrative (and advertising targeted to the content of our feed). Is this a good deal?
I’ll be cheering Caitlin on in her battle with the Twitter lords. Will she be able to figure out a way to up her followers by fooling the algorithm, mobilizing her supporters, or shaming the censors? Through the process, brand awareness for those affected will likely shift, to a thoroughgoing suspicion not only of Twitter, but of many other social, informational, and news portals. I hope that awareness expands to the framing of Twitter, which seems in danger of becoming the functional equivalent of Newspeak, an Orwellian thought-limiting abridgement to reduce the meaning of language as well as the number of words.
Just because the Internet was developed to have enhanced surveillance capabilities, doesn’t mean it has to stay that way or be used that way. In China, the world’s worst contravener of internet freedoms, Internet usage is a privilege, not a right. Free, unrestricted, no consequences internet access isn’t even a notion. If you try to post a comment on an article and it goes against the grain, it won’t be published. Not only are Twitter, Facebook, and unrestricted Google Searches not allowed, the tracking of your Internet history and commentary carries with it the risk of a reeducation camp sentence should you run afoul, and punishments like job loss to your relations should you be sufficiently offensive. It’s really impossible to imagine how draconian the thought control apparatus is outside of a Chinese context. And it’s getting worse. But you can get a bit of a sense of it from the reaction of the CCP authorities to the recent ascension of Xi Jinping (see the linked article).
China doesn’t just reduce the expansion of your followers to a trickle, it deletes your whole account. And it does so with abandon. Preemptively. And this is kind of a new kind of terror. For those who live a significant part of their lives in the social media world, the deletion of their account separates them — often permanently and irreparably — from the souls they connected with only via the handles used to identify them on the platform. It’s a kind of cyber-death, or virtual solitary confinement.
Listening to Levine on the Media Roots podcast, it’s not surprising that China should not only block Twitter, Facebook, etc., but develop their own versions of same. If these are tools of government spying, why would China want the U.S.A. to be surveilling its citizens? (Not to mention the revenue streams these surveillance tools are accompanied by. Overseas-listed Chinese internet firms have a combined market capitalization of over one trillion dollars, and three of China’s richest people are internet moguls.)
As part of the globalization process, our civilizations become more enmeshed with each other, as they geographically abut each other in closer and closer proximity (if you allow that changes in mass transportation and communication are the functional equivalent of a change in geography). i would argue that this phenomenon calls for us to be closer to the people and the cultures around us, in this case to use our geographical tools to express solidarity. Russia has recently been characterized as a draconian foe which must be sanctioned, castigated, impugned, and confronted militarily, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is their authoritarian government. But a close look on the ground shows their culture and government to be roughly as free as ours. Let’s partner with them so that we can increase the numbers of citizens looking for alternatives to increased government control and surveillance.
I think it is not only that side, today they blocked my account for nothing... I liked, retweeted and commented about the unbelievable idocracy, asked uncomfortable question to big corporations like amnesty or UN etc... I followed especially humans like you, Vanessa Beeley, James Corbertt Pierre LeCorf etc... for my part it is clear that today is the day I quit the Goolag, Fakebook & Snitcher propaganda platforms for good... Plus thanks to steemit I can support financially, you, investigative journalists and humans in general who got sick and tired of the narcissistic oligarchy abusing us every day in more and more natural human rights... Let us free our mind together! Thanks for you being!
Left or right if u are anti-establishment they are now censoring both oh and if ur a centrist or don't' play the left right divisive politics ur just simply fucked.