Twitter – We Knew The Game Was Rigged, but Damn…

So everybody knows about Elon buying Twitter, and we all know that Twitter has been a bunch of biased, censorious assholes.

What we did not know however was just how bad they really were. For years when conservatives/libertarians/non-progs complained, we got gas lit and told it was in our imagination. When our followers vanished, said they didn’t see our tweets, or our follower counts seemed to freeze and never grow, we were told that was just because we suck, and nobody wanted to listen to our evil right wing lies.

Until, of course, Elon started trying to buy the joint, and then they went from it never happens, to it happens and it is good and necessary.

I want to tell you guys what I’ve seen personally involving my account, and what’s changed in the last 48 hours.

I used Twitter a lot starting around 2011 or so, and kept using it for about five or six years pretty steadily. Then I got annoyed by the fact that I was clearly getting throttled, and mostly bailed, only using it to post links to blog posts and the occasional fight with an idiot. I stuck mostly to Facebook because I had more fans there who tended to actually buy books. Fast forward to 2020, where Facebook had gotten so bad that I couldn’t do or say anything without catching another 30 day ban (I’m on my 13th 30 day now), so I started using Twitter again.

For the last year I used it a lot, and I discovered that I could say a lot more political stuff without catching a ban. However, I could tell that I was still being throttled, and I would occasionally hear from friends I knew in real life about how they didn’t ever see me post there, and a few of them said that they knew they clicked to follow me, and had for a while, but then I would vanish from their list and they would have to re-follow.

Keep in mind, I’m a relative nobody on there. I got up to like 12k followers before I bailed out. That’s zilch in the grand scheme of things, but I’ve done enough culture war bullshit that my name usually shows up on the naughty list. In the time I’ve been posting regularly again, that follower count remained remarkably static, only growing by a few hundred people over a year.

Along comes Elon Musk, everybody is celebrating, having a good time, and I posted about how my feed looked a lot different. I was seeing people I’d not seen for years. (my first thought was that these were people who had been gone but were checking back in because of Elon buying it, but nope, they had been posting there the whole time)

Then I started getting tweets from followers who are like, whoa, Larry is back on Twitter!

So I got curious and started asking about this, and then the posts started coming. Dozens of them. Oh yeah, I thought you weren’t on here! I thought you only posted like once a month! I never see you post. So on and so forth. It was remarkably consistent.

I knew I was throttled, but I had not realized just how bad it was. It was way harder than I thought.

Then remember how my follower count had been static for the last year, even though I’d been tweeting a lot? I don’t know the actual numbers because I didn’t think to note them beforehand, but I jumped more that day than I had the prior year. It was like a pathetic growth of 200 for a year, and then 200 more THAT MORNING. I think it’s like 400 today.

Which makes me wonder how many followers I would actually have if they’d not been hiding my stuff? Facebook does the same thing. My follower count on there grew steadily and rapidly up to around 20k, where it froze and has remained stable for the last few years, which isn’t suspicious at all)

I’m just a social media blip. Yet meanwhile, all the big mega famous conservative accounts are jumping 5k, 10k, 80k(!) followers that day. While the giant lefty/RINO accounts are mysteriously shrinking by equally gigantic numbers.

This was of course blamed on angry leftists leaving in protest, and curious conservatives arriving… Except I don’t buy that. Some yes. All? No way. That’s somebody at Twitter putting their thumb on the scale to make the people with bad politics look weaker, and those with good politics look more popular.

Now, people were quick to point out that not enough time has passed for Elon to make changes. Nope. But changes have clearly happened. There is undeniable evidence of that. Which means while Twitter was busy burning evidence of all the things they lied to congress about, they must have flipped the Fuck Conservatives switch to off. The change was so sudden, blatant, and glaring that it was impossible to miss. Free speech had clumsily returned to Twitter.

Twitter may be a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but it is also a big hive which has been disproportionately persuasive in American culture. Polling shows that Twitter users lean overwhelmingly left (do they really though?) and the most prolific and popular (?) swing super crazy left. The problem then is stupid corporations (Disney, Netflix) look at Twitter, think it represents America, say lets cater to that, and then promptly step on their dicks, because it turns out that’s not what regular normal America wants at all.

So Elon forcing that thumb off the scale is potentially a huge thing in the culture war. I’ve been enjoying the hell out of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from leftist blue checks, because they know their ideas are such shit, the only way they can win is to lie with impunity about their competitors.

The whole fake follower thing has been hilarious to watch. For example, Super RINO Bill Kristol supposedly has nearly a million followers. I’ve got a measly 13k. Yet when we post stuff, I get a similar amount of interaction (likes, comments, quotes, etc.) Yet he’s got 75 TIMES the actual human followers I do? Uh huh… That’s totally plausible.

Long time readers will remember Sad Puppies, which in a lot of ways was a proto battle of the Culture Wars. The left used all the same sleazy dishonest tactics then, that are common now. If you’ll recall there was this one “news” website for scifi/fantasy publishing that everybody thought had this gigantic following. For years writers and publishers kissed this scumbag psycho’s fat ass, because they thought he had the power to make or break careers. Until we exposed the fact that 93% of his traffic was from Chinese bots, then poof. He became a meaningless punch line, and it turned out his audience was just a pathetic bunch of irrelevant whiners.

This is the same sort of thing, only orders of magnitude larger. The tech has evolved, but the grift remains the same. Leftists need everyone to think that their stupid beliefs are far more popular than they are. They have to control the narrative, because their actual platform is fucking garbage, which can’t ever stand up to logic or scrutiny.

Its the same reason Twitter does the shadow banning and hides posts from you. They need you to feel isolated and alone. They want you to feel like you’re the weirdo with the odd beliefs, and oh look over here, that polite RINO squish who thinks the GOP’s greatest purpose is to lose with dignity is wildly popular, and by golly, they’re gonna shove his stupid posts in your face every single day, regardless of how many times you say quit showing me this asshole.

How much has social media swayed people? How much difference does controlling the narrative and hiding inconvenient truths (hey Hunter come get your laptop!) make? How many points is that worth in an election?

And most importantly of all, how many more books could I have sold if these guys weren’t such pricks? 😀

We all knew the game was rigged, but now we get to see by how much!

Review: Capitol Punishment the Movie
WriterDojo S2 Ep17: Q&A-Business and Marketing

103 thoughts on “Twitter – We Knew The Game Was Rigged, but Damn…”

  1. The difference in Twitter is stark.
    If it had been this much fun this whole time Twitter would be HUGE.
    From what I have seen since the change, I’d be having a fit if I had been a shareholder.
    I can only imagine how much this behavior has depressed the stock price…
    I wonder if Musk was thinking the same thing when he made the offer.

  2. Yesterday for the first time I saw Tweets from Adam Baldwin and Ben Shapiro…and I’ve been on Twitter for about 11 years, give or take? Let’s go with 5-10 just in case; I can’t remember. But the point is that WITHOUT HUNTING THEM, yesterday was the first time they just…appeared. To quote Alice: “Curiouser and curiouser”….

  3. Anyone who allows Twitter (or Facebook or any other social media platform) shape their opinions deserve the world they will end up living in.

    1. Yeah, well, the rest of us have to live in it too, and those irrational dillweeds make that a pain.
      ———————————
      ‘Progressives’ suppress free speech because they don’t have the means to suppress free thought.

      Yet.

      1. This. Most people look at what is put in front of them. And twitter has been controlling the hell out of that.

        1. Personally, I am under a Twitter ban, and they will not even acknowledge my appeals. I have multiple Twitter accounts, and could use any of them, but they were all created with specific intent. Each one is for a separate project or endevour, but the one that got locked down is tied to my appleid. I am hoping that over the next couple of years, likely how long the transition will take, maybe I will get my appeal heard, but I am not going to hold my breath. Sure I could go back and delete the two offending posts about surviving necrotizing fasciitis, but since I think the real issue is that I tend to piss off liberals and unthinking conservatives (so to be clear that’s all liberals, and only the subset of conservatives that are unthinking), the ban will only recur. /shrug I have no ethical problem paying for Twitter, or any platform I might use so perhaps once that is implemented I will be heard on my appeal, until then I have other things to work on

    2. @ Road Runner; Who should we allow to hand us our news? CNN? NBC? NYT? Fox? Newsmax? While I like Newsmax and Even Fox, you are always getting some version of bias handed to you. What Social media platforms can do is allow all of us to talk to each other, and make it difficult for mainstream media to lie to us. Anyone so lofty that they think we simply dont need to have a way to talk to each other is way off. We are not going back to the days when 4 news channels could get away with shaping all of our opinions. And like it or not, we have to get information from somewhere. Im sure that Walter Cronkite misled people as much as anyone.

  4. I’ve been on Twitter for a couple years now, mostly to sort-of-kind-of follow some folks I know. Added a few people like our illustrious host here, Ringo, Gina Carrano, but nobody outright political (well, OK, Scalzi probably falls into that category)

    The outright FLOOD of posts, retweets, and such I’m now seeing from the conservative leaning folks is borderline deranged! And I’m NOT complaining as frankly it’s more interesting what they post than the ongoing “OrangeMan still bad and still his fault” from the other side.

    Kind of just points out that it wasn’t a thumb on the scale of what people would get to see, it wasn’t even an elephant…

    It was the USS Missouri and the USS North Carolina and the USS Nimitz on the scale…

  5. I’ve been on Twitter for about 6 months to promote my own content a bit. I thought Twitter was like the web because I was having to search to find people like Larry. Finding content from any of the sources I cared about was just a manual process. Today, I’m seeing a flood of different content I’ve never seen before

    The big question for everyone here – How does this impact this election cycle? Did this happen early enough for the left to move? Their only response to their problems thus far has been to double and triple down.

    1. One of the loudest Screams from the Perpetually Offended has been hoe Musk buying Twatter will mess up the Election, so Apparently THEY Think it will.

    2. Their response has been to try and start up a Ministry of Truth, thanks to the Biden admin. Or haven’t you heard?

      1. If you look at the information available, this new department has been coming for a while. For example, the department head mentioned that she’d been working there for a couple of months, but could only know reveal that. However, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter appears to have caused them to announce it earlier than they’d planned.

  6. I gave up Twitter when it made clear, for about the 12th time, that it didn’t want libertarian leaning conservatives. It’s nice to hear about the change, but I’m not going back.

    It is weird to me that suddenly Elon Musk is evil. He was the cool guy with electric cars and solar panels, and the left loved him. Then all of sudden he talks about free speech and looks to buy Twitter and he is LITERALLY WORSE THAN HITLER! It was such a weird and sudden change that I’m amazed more people aren’t commenting on the level of crazy “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” that represented. Even more entertaining are the hot takes and think pieces about “Oligarchs control social media/public square.” Like, who owns Twitter now? Who owns Facebook? Is a single Billionaire somehow worse than an multinational conglomerate like WarnerMedia Discovery? Who has ALWAYS owned most of the US media (hint: Search William Randolph Hearst for shits and giggles). That was small news before, but now it is A BIG DEAL! that a billionaire might own a tech company?

    1. They used to love Trump. He had his own TV shows, rappers talked about “getting rich like Trump” and he was an icon. If he’d come out on their side of things, even if he had the same policies, we’d be the ones stupid for hating him according to the left.

      1. Hillary and, IIRC Obama BOTH said that Trump would make a “Good/Great President”…until he ran as a Republican, and Suddenly he was Literally Hitler.

    2. See any Communist country. The Communists keep on throwing their own to wolves when it’s convenient for the Party.

      It’s not to Cultural Revolution or Moscow Show Trial scale. Yet.

    3. You forgot the best one – who owns the Washington Post?

      The NYT also had – or possibly still has – a Mexican billionaire as one of its owners.

  7. Holy f***berries.

    So, I’ve been trolling around Twitter ever since the Blizzard Lawsuit hit (had an account much longer but cleaned it out prior to that when everyone was getting hit with ‘muhdisinformation’ during the 2 million days to flatten the curve). I had been following you and a bunch of other Baen authors and thought you all had stopped posting or gotten banned. Just went to see who all had come back and somehow I had unfollowed all of you. ALL. OF. YOU.

    Yeah, I tend to only unfollow spambots and people whose every Twitter post is ‘BUY MY BOOK.’ But somehow I must have gotten clocked over the head and unfollowed all of y’all and forgotten about it.

  8. This is all about cleaning up the code base before Elon Open Sources it.

    I think their plan is to make the code and algorithms fair and balanced now, so that when they push it out to open source, they can say “Hey, see, its not biased!!”

    But Elon doesn’t need to just open source the current code, he needs to open source the whole repository and its entire change history!!! If he does that I believe forensic analysis of the code will show STUNNINGLY EVIL manipulation of the code to punish and block conservatives on the platform.

    I would not be surprised if they are trying to wipe out some of those changes from the historical code right now so the evidence can’t be found. But I’ll be really suspicious (so you mean there were ZERO code changes from July 2020 to January 2021??? REALLY?!?!)

    This is part of trying to HIDE THE EVIDENCE!!!

    1. it’s especially interesting to see such changes during a time that all changes were supposed to have stopped (because even the twitter management knows how bad it will look if they are sabotaged by their leftist employees)

    2. Yep, and Facebook, Reddit and YouTube among others will I think in some measure be forced to dial back their throttling of non leftist speech because of Elons takeover. The contrast will be too apparent. Also, were businesses that used these platforms for marketing throttled if the censors didn’t approve of them for any reason? Massive lawsuits could be in the offing if so.

      Also, this whole charade is a great example of fascist tactics similar to those used by Mussolini. He had very few actual supporters but managed to stage events to make the govern ment think otherwise. Just like Hillary’s crowds leading up to the 2016 election or any public appearance for Biden.

    3. Makes me wish for the good old days of paper trails, when the Nazis and the Stasi literally could not shovel their archived records into the incinerator fast enough to prevent capture.

    4. Well, I’d assume that they use a DB table to contain the ids of those users who need “special treatment”. The DB table updates probably won’t be in the code base and would only have backups as history.

      1. But the very fact that such a mechanism existed and the ways in which it acted should be interesting to expose, regardless of whether Musk and his allies in the company manage to save the database.

  9. Twitter was not “rigged”. Lemme ‘splain.

    Carnival games are rigged. They use illusion, odd angles, the laws of physics, non-regulation size targets at non-regulation distances, etc. — all kinds of tricks to make it harder to win but give you just enough hope that you keep shelling out money to try. You’ll eventually win the prize, but you’ll spend $50 for a stuffed animal that cost them less than a dollar.

    Rigged games are unfair, but they are still possible to win if you see the “trick” and have the skill to work around it, or are willing to keep grinding away long enough to win by pure random chance (which is the carnival’s preference).

    That’s the difference: carnival games are rigged, but still winnable.

    Twitter, by contrast, choked off conservative voices by quietly imposing a hard limit on how many followers they could keep, demoting and delisting accounts and search results, enacting shadow bans so that nobody saw what conservatives posted, and hundred other measures to isolate and silence us.

    “Progressives”, on the other hand, got the exact opposite treatment: inflated follower counts, promoted search results, the Blue Check Mark used as a brick-bat, and NEVER getting suspensions or shadow bans no matter how violent or hateful the rhetoric got. (Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and ISIS all still have active accounts where they regularly post about exterminating Israel and all the Jews. Antifa and BLM still have active accounts where they coordinate riots, doxx conservatives, and talk about assaulting or killing police. Because that’s not violent or hateful — or violate “community standards” — AT ALL. *smh*)

    Twitter set the rules and algorithms to be simply unwinnable for conservatives. At least at the carnival you win sometimes, but on Twitter you could not.

    It wasn’t “rigged”; it was impossible.

  10. Some have said that this can’t have happened overnight, especially when no actual Musk Events have taken place.
    I say that this is just like roaches.
    When you turn the light on they scatter.
    No actual squishing, stomping, or spraying has begun, yet they scatter since they know what the light means, and what happens next.

    1. They probably have a lot of employees who have been “leftists” because baby needs shoes, either with some reluctance or because they are people who really don’t care all that much about anything but their own bottom line, and will do whatever it takes to keep a job they need or like because of the pay/other conditions.

      The ones now changing things inside most likely come from those people, the ones who are now sure that the company is going to change, and if they look like active advocates for free speech and whatever they will be more secure under the new ownership, and some who are doing it with pleasure because that is what they have been really wanting to do the whole time, except one has to pay that mortgage so…

      1. We know that all of these companies have conservatives borrowed inside of them. They’re the ones who leak the jaw dropping stuff that comes out. Further, the lefties know that the conservatives are there, and are paranoid about them.

  11. Some bold media predictions for the near future:

    1.) Expect a flood of vaguely-foreign tech billionaire villains who are into space travel and white supremacy.

    2.) A bunch of new dystopian libertarian fascist futures brought about by unlimited free speech.

    3.) The new “villain tell” will be a mention of how much they love free speech.

    4.) Non-fiction articles/documentaries/books about how free speech brought about slavery, the Patriarchy, and Hitler.

    1. This is where you go subvert the trope: you actually do make the Big Bad according to those tropes, and then you have the brave resistance fighters work against him for four seasons until midst fifth season, the protagonists finally realize they were Outer Party stooges for the Inner Party the whole time.

      If you really want to be a legendary jerk about it, you don’t tell the actors what the plot twist is, but give them fake scenes of them ‘infiltrating the evil organization’ throughout back-to-back filmed Seasons Five and Six, and only when they see the show aired do they realize that their characters actually changed sides and it was all fixed in editting.

    2. Oh, for sure. Next year’s award nominees will all be plucky Leftists fighting Dr. Elon… sorry I meant Eeevile.

      Here’s a question for you: how much does Amazon throttle e-books? Betting the answer is not zero.

      1. Amazon has definitely given writers of wrong think non-fiction issues. As for all other ebooks, they push to the top the books published by Amazon imprints, the books in Kindle Unlimited, and the books with the biggest AMS ad spend. Everyone else has no visibility unless they come with a big audience.

  12. I’m curious about the work culture will change at Twitter. Out curiosity, I checked out their careers page, and I actually did laugh out loud. It’s basically a “woke company” parody page, except it’s totally real.

    Anyway, I wonder what it’ll be like in a few months or a year. Will it tone down?

    1. I think it will take more than a year. Remember, the deal has been signed, but it’s not final yet and won’t be until near the end of the year. Then Musk needs to put his own upper management in place, and they need to replace middle management, and then the big changes will happen…

      hopefully this will speed up a bit by mass resignations. That may be a bit painful for a little while, but if you aren’t updating things, computers are far more stable than they are given credit for (I’ve been in places that have been extremely shorthanded on the tech side far too many times, it catches up over the long term, but in the short term it’s not that bad for users, painful as it can be for the employees)

    2. Twitter is opening an office in Toronto right now, hoovering up all the new-grad software engineers they can get. Probably hoping to displace the California Wokester crowd with some people who will actually get work done.

  13. I only joined Twitter to see Larry put the smack down on idiots. It’s the best entertainment I’ve had all year in between books.

    1. Only downside of all this is Larry will have a harder time finding #TerribleTwitterWritingAdvice to read on Monster Dojo, since they won’t be amplified so much.

  14. I can almost guarantee there are/were “config” tables that hold lists of “bad” users which drive the shadow banning or blocking …
    the problem for them is they can’t just delete those tables (it would crash the rest of the code) … they can truncate them sure … which is what they may have just done … the code keeps running as normal … if Elon gets his hands on the source code he may find out just how deep the rot went … just how much nonsense was hard coded into the system …

    1. It would also be interesting to see who requested the censoring of certain people or groups. Maybe political parties, “NGOs”, foreign governments and our own alphabet agencies, as well as the state department and executive and legislative branches?

      I would bet serious money on it.

      1. Check out the lecture given by Dr. Shiva Ayuraday {???} on his website and included in Mike Lindell’s Cybersymposium. Dr. Shiva was a political candidate that got eff’d by secret aspects of the government – he took it to court and what came out was basically what YOU are correctly guessing is REAL. They have their “Playbooks,” etc. and are all about “official” opinion-making and shutting up people whose opinions they don’t like, who they deem to have credibility. Dr. Shiva was such a target. This is supposedly in court records. The court session was supposed to be short and last just a few hours, but the judge, siding with Dr. Shiva, made it last DAYS instead of HOURS. Uncovered all sorts of systematized, unconstitutional suppression going on by very powerful people.

    2. Changelogs would likely also have the information. And not keeping changelogs is pretty much suicidal for a company built around a single piece of software.

      1. Database updates don’t come with changelogs. You may get logs for a while that track updates, but with the traffic Twitter handles, they couldn’t afford to keep all the logs the software can generate.

  15. Spot on as usual, Larry.

    Although I do have a question – are you feeling OK? I think I got to about the 5th paragraph before I ran into your first use of profanity. Man, if Elon Musk can get you to do that, the guy is a real miracle worker!
    (Just teasing a little, folks – although I usually post disclaimers when I link to this blog because some people do get distracted by “bad words”. Didn’t have to do that for this blog post.)

  16. Looking at it all, obviously there’s a tech aspect to this, but I’m willing to bet it was policy Twitter used to choke off and control traffic. And that policy stance has a lot to do with their general counsel, the one they keep calling the “moral” guide of the company and like a true professional, burst out crying in that leaked Town Hall audio we’re just seeing now. The CEO himself noted that where they screwed up big time wasn’t in the “products” but policies, and how they implemented them. In short, Twitter turned itself into a rule-making body, to such an extent they ought to be suable.

  17. “How many points is that worth in an election?”

    I do not know, as I am not a psephologist. However, I am a newspaperman, and I know the backing of the mainstream news is worth between 5% and 15%

    Social media, if anything, is more dangerous than newspapers, because a newspaper slant can be more easily detected. Who can tell when an algorithm is merely not telling you what it is not telling you?

    1. I recall the editor of Newsweek saying in 2004 that the MSM’s bias slanted the polls by 15%. I believe the number is significantly higher now.

  18. With regards to the Chinese bots – didn’t you prove it because the owner of the site posted his web traffic to try and claim he was more important than you Larry?

    1. Yep. He clowned himself. That was him trying to put me in my place because his traffic was so much bigger than you guys.
      Whoops. 🙂

      1. I have to say, that is one of the more epic take downs of that stupid site I have ever read from you, and that’s saying something given your history of epic take downs of Vile770.

  19. Remember: The people whining and claiming they’ll quit are also degenerate addict who will be back within the week.

    1. Or never leave in the first place. At most they’ll temporarily disable the account and then come back a week later when they think no one is looking.

  20. It is generally recognized that a free human
    being has certain inalienable rights. Free speech,rights of self defense, rights of property, right to peacefully assemble, etc.
    A slave has no such rights, and the censorship
    movement on the liberal left is nothing but an attempt to enslave us. Point that out the next time you talk to one of these hypocrite libs.

    1. Talking factually about slavery is “culturally insensitive.” Like the teacher who got in trouble for bringing cotton bolls to school, to teach about the cotton gin.

  21. Have you heard from people who fear China Mike let us know because of the fact his followers are all made up? That would be really interesting to see how many authors have started ignoring him

  22. I can see a lot of familiar faces on Twitter now, but I’m still perma-banned for the apparent sin of telling some Pantifa/BLM types that if they want to riot in my neighborhood, and drag me and mine out of my house to string up from a streetlight, they would get to us through a stack of their bleeding out or dead comrades. Apparently, that was threatening violence. No, the threat of violence was when a BLM dickweed told me he’d fuck my wife in front of me.

    Congrats on being visible again.

  23. Expect to see the same sort of response at Monster Hunters International-Hunters Unite! in the coming weeks. I just joined a month ago, and while there are the rules about religion and politics, people are posting their discontent with Facebook’s continuing trend of bullying.

  24. Interesting is right! I would see maybe a post a week from you, now, one or more posts a day! Whatta change!!!

  25. There are enough pieces of public documentation that a change in behavior of the platform would be provable. A chart of retweets across a broad number of users, across a few months, would be enough. Making a case that the change is due to the platform changing, and not public attitudes will be more difficult, but not impossible.

  26. I recall people of no political stripe at all having problems with Twitter. It’s not hard to find stories about people of nearly any strong political opinion having difficulties with the platform either. I’d like to see if just political conservatives had a change, just some people saw a difference, or everyone did. Maybe conservatives were targeted. That’s not hard to believe. I just don’t have any data sets to compare.

    1. The data is there now.
      Conservative accounts are suddenly growing and have more reach. Lefty accounts are suddenly withering.
      The bigger the account, the more visible the difference.

      1. Larry, I’m hoping someone captures some numbers. There’s the old saw about facts, “If you don’t have the numbers, it’s just an opinion.”

        1. Lots of people have been posting comparisons of the follower numbers of the various big left and right pundit accounts.
          The real numbers for everybody which would be valuable for any meaningful statistical comparison can only come from Twitter itself.

    2. Untrue. People with left leaning politics have no trouble with twitter unless they do something like post porn. For comparison, the Boston Subway Shooter had an active Twitter account, not banned despite the insanely racist and violent tweets. Same with Darrell Brooks Jr, or any BLM supporter. No trouble at all. Jussie Smollet had an account with no problems after repeatedly saying he told the truth. I know of no left wing face that lost their account. Compare to the literally thousands of conservatives from the Babylon Bee, Mylo Y, Alex Jones, Laura Loomis, Roger Stone, marjorie Taylor Greene, James O’Keefe( Project veritas)….the list is literally endless.

  27. The numbers would be fascinating, to see whose posts got responses in the last 14 months, and the increase or decrease. I could “see” a chart which would bring clarity, similar to the F curve of the last election.

  28. I am from a socialist country so I think I can better explain.
    The government need some piece of legislation to pass, or rig an election which of course could never happen in America.
    “Maximum coverage”. All that is indexed goes visible and all the rest goes idle. Meaning that everything from likes to retweet it’s just counters in a database file.
    Just the time to make you upset and, because now the “thing” is a true social issue that needs regulated, including election results that could never happen in America, it gets fixed.
    What I mean is that Twitter does not even need people. About the same profile i might see 1k followers and a friend of mine 1M. Because Twitter knows we are friends we will probably see the same number.
    Trusting programs is like trusting mail ballots. There’s a lot of idiots out there.

  29. I remember you saying to me when you visited London for your signing at Forbidden Planet (2016; doesn’t time fly) about the difference between British and American politics. Didn’t understand it then, I think I do now.

    For me, SF fandom started to brew up a storm circa 2009 with racefail, and I first felt its fallout at the 2014 London Worldcon. Regardless of the issues, the blatant in your face that whiteness equals evil is just so wrong that I almost don’t know where to begin.

    Almost, only because the effort to refute accusations takes far more effort than making an accusation. As for that other site, I try to avoid it.

  30. Mr. Correia:

    Robert A. Heinlein is often quoted from the “this is referred to as ‘bad luck’” from the collection of pithy statements in “Time Enough for Love”. This is a good time to remind people of another quote from “…If This Goes On” (aka, “Revolt in 2100”):

    “For the first time in my life, I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet’s censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy…censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to it’s subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know’, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked, contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

    With all of the corporate/government censorship going on I’d love to see this one become a meme since it’s so applicable these days.

  31. James Woods gained over 73,000 followers in 2 days and it’s not because “racists suddenly feel safe on twitter”

  32. It would be interesting to see the results of the Baen experiment promoting Servants of War on Twitter repeated now.

  33. In answer to Twitter being purchased by Elon, you may have noticed that today the Department of Homeland Security is going to stand up a for-real Ministry of Truth.

    Funny how that happened so quick, eh?

  34. And now the Puppet Administration is announcing a “Disinformation Governance Board”, just two days after Musk buys Twitter. How very coincidental!

    1. “But…what is disinformation?”

      A: Anything they don’t want you to hear.

      “We have always been at war with Eastasia. Any claims that we have always been at war with Eurasia last week are disinformation and must be reported to the Ministry Of Truth at once.”

  35. I hear those shredders screaming,

    Running night and day,

    Makin’ pesky paper

    Ev’dence go away,

    Elon now owns Twitter

    And the panic has kicked in,

    ‘Cause they’re soon to be movin’

    Down to San Antone…

    Argh. Scansion crashed there like Disney or Netflix stock. Anyone else wanna take over?

  36. Both Facebook and Twitter throttle TWB, and have been doing it for years. I saw great rise in numbers, and then it seemed to plateau maybe 6 years ago.

    Twitter liked to keep my follower count around the 20,000 mark, while Facebook thought it was better if I was just a few shy of the 10,000 mark. Just checked this morning and still at 20,000 for Twitter, but Facebook has been removing followers as I went from 10,000 down to 8,800 sometime in the last month or so.

    No outright bans yet, but the throttling and shadow bans do make me ask similar questions Larry.

    1. Twitter isnt a nation. Its a private company. However, because big corporations have a strangle hold on the internet…we need something better. But we can’t exactly ask a private company to simply hand out rights.

      1. We (the us) already give them some pretty magical rights under section 230. They get to not be responsible for the legality of anything posted to their platform. It seems reasonable we should ask for rights in return for those legal protections.

  37. I never used Twitter much. I had joined in 2017…yes, along with everyone else because of Trump. Anyways FFD to today, I stopped using it because the shadow banning was just too absurd. 2 K followers appeared out of nowhere.

  38. I’m worried. I don’t want a Department of Disinformation. I feel like there going to roll up and tell me that we ‘Always been at war with Eurasia’!

  39. I’m one of those whose accounts have been “miraculously” restored.

    I follow you already, Larry.

    Twitter handle @tanstaafl6823

    And actually this is my….third? fourth? account over there.

  40. > Until, of course, Elon started trying to buy the joint, and then they went from it never happens, to it happens and it is good and necessary.

    That’s the Democrat Two-Step.

    Step 1: Of course this bizarre and abnormal thing will never happen! There must be something wrong with you for even suggesting anyone would do that. What are you, some sort of conspiracy theorist?

    [then it happens, exactly as predicted]

    Step 2: Of course this perfectly normal thing happened! There must be something wrong with you for even suggesting there’s a problem with it. What are you, some sort of bigot?

    You see it all the time in any sort of remotely political topic. I bet you can name half a dozen times it’s happened just from memory alone.

  41. They flipped the “fuck conservatives” button to off, so that their Ministry of Truth would have ammo to point at for all the wrong think and wrong fun. That and to shred evidence, so that you can’t sit there and say on the day of the turnover to Elon, “look at all the throttling.”

  42. They’re trying to sneak the old games back in. Mike Lindell has been banned again, for one thing. Other tweeters are reporting missing followers.

    1. I think we’re seeing an internal war between “true believers” and those who are scared to death that they’ll be implicated. The true believers double down, even while the other group is trying to erase evidence.

  43. First thing I thought when Elon Musk was said to be buying Twitter is “What the hell does anyone wanna own the Internet’s sewer for? If the Internet needed a suppository, Twitter is where they’d stick it.”

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