UPDATE It is astonishing how many people are incapable of comprehending the following phrase from the article below:
The account still exists and is visible online
Yes, I know the account is still there. The problem is I am locked out from my account and bizarrely, when I try to recover it the process ends with an automated meassage saying there is no such account.
An extraordinary number of people in comments on Facebook, Twitter and below the line here are triumphantly posting that they can still find the account, with the implication I am not blocked. I know it is still there. I said that. I have been locked out of it.
END OF UPDATE
I appear to have been banned from Twitter. For over a week I have not been able to log in to my account.
When I enter the password it takes me automatically to the Help Centre, where an automated message tells me the account @craigmurrayorg does not exist. When I enter my email address and phone number it tells me it has no record of them.
All this on a 15 year old blue tick account with 110,000 followers.
The account still exists and is visible online, though very difficult to find because of extreme shadowbanning.
Although my account has been heavily shadowbanned for years, until now this has never shown up in the shadowban test sites.
The reason for this is that my account has been previously limited by twitter not showing my tweets to my followers, which the shadowban test sites cannot test for. It has not previously been shadowbanned from searches, which they can test for.
The additional shadowbanning on the account has come into place at approximately the same time Twitter locked me out, which seems to rule out the removal of my account access being a technical glitch.
The wordpress to twitter function has also been blocked, by which posts on this blog were tweeted out on my twitter account. That is an entirely different mechanism to the normal login, so again this is not a technical password glitch.
This was my last tweet before I was banned. With no other information from Twitter, I can only presume this tweet prompted the ban.
Every attempt to use the appeal mechanisms that exist when a twitter account is suspended or banned, are closed off by a message that the account does not exist and they have no record of my contact details, which is absolutely not true.
Over half the traffic to this website comes via twitter. On this website I express in mild and sometimes intellectual terms my dissent from the neoliberal world view.
In the past two years this has caused me to be jailed, to be interviewed about leaks on another matter by the Police, to be thrown out of the National Union of Journalists, to have two laptops stolen, to have my facebook account hacked and my twitter account blocked.
The warning bells for the freedoms of speech and dissent we took for granted in western society could not be ringing louder nor more clearly.
I cannot of course take to twitter to tell people I have been blocked by twitter. I should be most grateful if those of you with twitter accounts could tweet about this and link to this post. Please do the same on any other social media which you use.
May I ask if you have thought about subscribing to support this blog and my work, that you do so now? The efforts to cut off my social media reach and traffic to this site are also of course a threat to the income which supports me.
But the site will as always remain free and open, and the content is free to republish and repost elsewhere, including in translation.
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Moon of Alabama wrote today, concerning his own Twitter issues (how he most likely was victim of a “member-cap”):
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/02/twitter-censorship-and-the-crapification-path-of-social-media.html#more
“(…) Twitter Censorship And The Crapification Path Of Social Media
On January 6 I wrote about the Twitter files:
Twitter Files Show How The Deep State Conquered Social Media
Part of the quoted reporting by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and others was about Twitter censorship:
Twitter Files Part 2, by @BariWeiss, December 8, 2022
TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS
Bari Weiss gives a long-awaited answer to the question, “Was Twitter shadow-banning people?” It did, only the company calls it “visibility filtering.” Twitter also had a separate, higher council called SIP-PES that decided cases for high-visibility, controversial accounts.
Key revelations: Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a “Search Blacklist” (for Dan Bongino), a “Trends Blacklist” for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a “Do Not Amplify” setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Weiss quotes a Twitter employee: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” With help from @abigailshrier, @shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, and @isaacgrafstein.
This was of special interest to me as my account, @MoonofA, was throttled:
Until late 2021 my Twitter account @MoonofA, which I mostly use to promote my writings here, was not allowed to grow beyond 19,500 followers. There were also signs that tweets by me were not shown to users who were following me. After my account was released from the growth prison it rapidly grew to 47,500 followers in the fall of 2022. It then again went into growth prison for no discernible reason and without me getting any notice of it. Now anytime my follower count increases by 100 or so it will automatically be slashed back to 47,450 followers. There are also again signs that tweets from my account are again ‘shadowbanned’.
Someone at Twitter must have read the above. One or two days after I published the piece my account was again allowed to grow. It has since gained more than 2,500 new followers for a total of more than 50,000.
I do not know though to what degree I am still shadow banned or not. (…)”
Silencing dissent on social media platforms undermines our right to diverse opinions. Standing with @craigmurrayorg against unjust restrictions is crucial for upholding free speech online. #FreeSpeechMatters