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!
