Merry Christmas – Your Account Has Been Suspended: Update & Cry for Help

Editor’s note: well, the day I’ve told you was all coming on numerous occasions finally arrived, and on Christmas Day no less; if you give Jack nothing else, you’ve gotta give him points for inappropriate timing at least. Yes, that is correct, my Twitter account has once again been suspended and yes, I recently crossed 4,000 followers so, based on past experience, I actually had expected this to happen sooner. Check out the post below to find out what I’m going to do about it.

 

Just the Facts Ma’am

Well how are you folks on this fine Christmas morning? Hopefully your holiday is going better than mine is, let me tell you.

At roughly 10:30 AM today, my Twitter account @NatSecReporter was suspended (presumably permanently) without warning, or adequate notice of what I’d done to deserve the suspension short of a generic boilerplate page about “violating the Twitter rules” somehow. This is definitely not a twelve hour, or even one week ban; the account is simply suspended and not only can I not post but also my timeline is no longer showing me new tweets – in other words, this is the ban-hammer I’ve been expecting for a while. As anyone who has been suspended on Twitter knows already (more on this below) a suspension with no specific reasoning other than “broke the rules” is pretty much the standard method of operation for Twitter, and it facilitates all kinds of abusive behavior around mass reporting, brigading and trolling timelines to find old tweets that violate new Twitter posting guidelines.

Naturally, I have in fact engaged Twitter’s automated appeals process, if only in the hopes of finding out precisely why I’ve been banned. I must admit however that past experience and watching a whole bunch of my online lefty friends get wrongfully suspended and lose their accounts anyway, despite appealing, does strongly lead me to suspect nothing is going to come of that appeal and my account is simply gone into the ether, forever. I should note that the professional writing account @ASNinaWrites, which as I’ve mentioned repeatedly I do not in fact manage and is run by someone I pay to promote my work, is still up; again however, that account is not me, it’s not run by me, it doesn’t tweet like me and I won’t be posting updates there.

 

Sorting out the Whys

While the arbitrary and counter-intuitive nature of Twitter’s reporting, suspension and appeals system does largely render the specific reason I got suspended irrelevant, I’ve naturally wasted a bunch of my time this afternoon trying to figure it out anyway. If there is in fact a specific reason I’ve been suspended, it’s probably one of these below:

When I woke up this morning, my mentions were full of nonsense about Canadian COVID relief from a couple of accounts with Democrat/neoliberal signifiers in their bios (@RichSeviora and @Jill_on_Twtr specifically.) Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I think both of these accounts belong to liberal-aligned political mercenaries doing online pushback and flak for the Democratic Party, and they found my account because I’d quote tweeted something they didn’t like by Jules Suzdaltsev. Truthfully however, the tweet replies from the first two accounts were just such garbage I told both of them to more or less fuck off, and blocked them; unfortunately I didn’t actually remember to star-out the u in “f*ck” this time so it’s entirely possible one of them reported me out of spite and that’s what this ban is about. Furthermore it’s also possible that one of them reported my initial tweet for “coronavirus disinformation” but it feels unlikely. Factually we were arguing about covid relief packages across borders, not covid itself; additionally since the guy who started this shit is currently trying to argue that $1800 US total, is more than 2,000 a month Canadian, I’m not sure “accuracy” is really buddy’s forte. Obviously, my advice would be to block both accounts and never interact with them online if I were you, but it’s your life kids.

This morning I also tweeted “close the damn camps” at Joe Biden, but made the classic rube mistake of actually tagging his Twitter account. Although damn has usually not been considered a swear word in the modern online discourse, it factually counts as one in polite society. Naturally, Biden has a verified account and thus maybe one of his aides reported me for saying “damn” at Joe Biden. This does seem a little unlikely to me however since the suspension came at least a half hour after I’d actually typed out that tweet.

It is also entirely possible that any one of the numerous people I’ve pissed off online, from literally every shit-tier social grouping on the Bird Site, just decided to report an old tweet of mine and Twitter went for it. Who might be that mad at me? Hell, who isn’t? It could be nazis, it could be TERFs, it could definitely be the miserable K-Hive shitheels who push online abuse to protect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, it could be some crypto-reactionary Mike Tracey stan, hell it might be that weird obsessive compulsive guy who spent the first third of December subtweeting me from behind a block; the list of folks who don’t particularly like me, or any other outspoken socialist who is also an anti-racist, is rather long. Additionally, since Twitter has not provided me a single tweet to explain my ban, it might not even be the result of anything I’ve tweeted today or recently at all. Furthermore, since the Twitter suspension and appeals process is an opaque box run by trashfire liberals, it’s entirely possible this ban has been coming for a while and for whatever reason the internal workings of Twitter just finally spit it out today, on Christmas Day.

Personally, I suspect that I was targeted by members of the toxic neoliberal/Democratic Party online stan community, based on purposely misinterpreting a tweet where I said the left needs to “send Pelosi to the bottom of the sea and declare war” – after which it took less than a minute for my account to be straight up suspended. Is that ridiculous? Of course, nobody reading my tweet could possibly assume that I sincerely wanted people to drown Nancy Pelosi; it was a metaphor for sinking her as House Speaker and everyone even remotely plugged into real life American politics knows that; reporting Tweets out of context is however absolutely nothing new for the kind of troll networks the Democrats operate online.  This is at the moment, my working theory on why my account just got banned; due to the timing, and in light of the fact that numerous other popular left wing accounts among my circle of friends have recently been targeted (and banned) by mass reporting among Democratic Party online operatives and hardcore fanatics, including of course the aforementioned “K-Hive.”

Finally of course, and given that this is not my first Twitter account to get banned, it may well just be that Twitter finally decided “yup, the person using @NatSecReporter is in fact the same Nina Illingworth we banned for swearing at shit tier political operatives way back in 2016, let’s nuke her for evading that ban” – a reality I face every day online, and a major reason I have spent so much time and energy trying to get my readers to follow me on other sites that are not Twitter; a quest that really hasn’t been as successful as I’d like, if I’m being honest with you here.

 

So What Now?

Well, in the short term I’m going to have to wait for the Twitter appeals process to play out; despite the fact that I have no reason to believe Twitter is actually going to restore my account. In the meantime, I’ve decamped to my spaces at Mastodon, Facebook and on my Discord server. Whether you want to catch up with me there or not is your decision, I’ve spent years trying to teach my readers to follow something besides my one damn Twitter account and they don’t seem to listen, so I have no idea what the point of repeating that here is.

Friends and fans can, if they so desire, tweet at @Jack and @TwitterSupport to demand the restoration of the @NatSecReporter account; I’ve seen that work in the past but realistically, it seems to take thousands of complaints to get Twitter to rescind a bullshit ban, so I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. Additionally, folks who’re worried about missing notifications about my newest articles are encouraged to follow my hype-man @ASNinaWrites on Twitter; although you might want to also drop us a like/follow on Facebook in case Twitter decides to ban my hype-man just for knowing me – at this point I can’t rule it out.

Finally I should note that you could always use the Contact Page and just follow me across social media, on sites like Tumblr, BlogSpot and Instagram; I have never, in over ten years of being online across multiple branches of social media, been suspended from all of my websites at the same time so it’s basically a given I’ll be somewhere online, no matter what happens. You could even subscribe to my free-to-read Patreon Blog, using the recommended “$1 per month” minimal donation to stay updated on all my work – really the choice is yours; it’s not like I haven’t provided enough options besides Twitter.

One thing I will say however is that if and when my appeal is rejected, I will not be establishing a new Twitter account. I told you folks last time that @NatSecReporter was my last attempt to survive a social media environment actively hostile to leftists on that site, and I meant it. If for some reason you are simply unwilling, or unable to follow me and my work on some other social media site, well then I guess this is “goodbye and fare thee well.” At this point, my relationship with Twitter feels extremely abusive and after seven accounts, all of which seem to get banned immediately when I finally regrow my audience over four thousand readers, I’ve decided to simply stop making content for a website that could not be clearer about how badly it does not want me.

 

A Question of Survival

Unfortunately all of this then forces me to start a conversation with my readers that I’ve been trying to avoid because I’m tired of being called crazy; the issue of online censorship of the left.

The simple truth here is that while it’s certainly not being reported very often by the mainstream media, big tech companies have been quietly silencing anti-capitalist, anti-establishment and even frankly anti-fascist voices online through a variety of methods; some of them overt and some of them quite covert. Obviously we’ve already looked at troll armies that support establishment power, but the reality is that getting your accounts banned on social media is really only the most overt form of flak an independent, socialist or anarchist writer can expect to encounter online. As readers who are plugged into popular socialist and dissident websites will know, the covert censorship accomplished by Google de-ranking, or otherwise dampening the reach of left wing political discourse, is far more insidious and dangerous to us all.

Look, you might think I’m crazy for saying this but at this point I’ve completely run out of fucks to give; after over ten years online and just over five years of publishing dissident, socialist analysis as an independent creator, I am absolutely convinced that sites which encourage mass content creation by its users (Twitter, Facebook, etc) are actively dampening how far left wing posts, particularly those posts that contain images or links to socialist writing, go in the online discourse. To put it bluntly, this is not really a suspicion on my part; I’ve got the metrics to prove it. The fact is, when I first started writing my thoughts here on this website back in 2016, it was fairly common for all of my articles to garner well over a thousand views and in some cases, well over ten thousand; furthermore, I frequently appeared on the first page of search listings. Today, after years of online censorship and algorithm tweaking, and despite the fact that my writing has improved leaps and bounds since that moment, I’m lucky to get four hundred hits on the vast majority of articles unless a very big account retweets it and you typically can’t find my work, even searching by direct title until several pages deep on the Google rankings. Even factoring my shall we say “charming personality” – this makes no sense at all; I’m being purposely strangled and shut out of the discourse, along with pretty much any other independent leftist creator online.

Again, you might be tempted to believe I’m being paranoid or you may find yourself saying “well Google is just one search engine” but factually, based entirely on recorded website metrics across all of the places I post my work, even though I’ve been gaining readers and followers – these websites are showing my work to a vastly smaller number of people. This is particularly apparent when I post anything on Twitter or Facebook that has a link to my work or an image, literally any image. If you’re a fairly active online leftist, I’m sure you can prove this to yourself if you like by accessing your post metrics on Twitter and comparing posts with a link/image, against posts that are just text and you will see the vast numerical difference before your very eyes. If after scoping out the numbers you still don’t believe me, ask some of your faves about it, I’m sure they’ve noticed.

Whether you want to blame this on crackdowns against fake news, the fact that Twitter hired a former Kamala Harris operative right before the 2020 Democratic Party primary season, or simply that Jack and his Saudi backers are very rich men who don’t like pinkos, is really up to you. My studied opinion is that rich tech bros are not in the business of helping people like me teach you how to conduct a socialist revolution and quietly, they’ve clearly decided to do something about it; and frankly, if you’re a betting woman, you’d be pretty silly to pick little ole me in a fight against united Tech billionaires falling all over themselves to appease a Democratic Party administration that’s already hinting about going after Section 230.

 

A Desperate Cry for Help

So, is this a death sentence for my work as a socialist and anarchist independent analyst? Well, if something doesn’t change it sure would seem that way, wouldn’t it? I mean right now over half of my site references come from tweets by my (now suspended) account @NatSecReporter, and even before this, I’ve watched my views tumble by more than half simply due to algorithms and targeted censorship of anti-capitalist voices online. I don’t expect that account to be reactivated, and I’ve already told you I’m not creating a new one so at the moment I’m pretty much relying on my Facebook and the work my hype-man at @ASNinaWrites puts in for the mere 730 followers who actually listened to me when I begged them to follow that account because “sooner or later Twitter is going to suspend me again and I’m not coming back.”

I mean, let’s break it down to brass tacks; I’m probably not going to keep writing lengthy, academically sourced essays for fifty people who really like my stuff but are for some reason shy about sharing it, right? I do not, and have not ever charged a dime for any of the content I’ve created that so many people have told me they loved; there is no paywall, no secret posts for members, no merchandise and since the very beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, I haven’t even solicited donations on my work because I didn’t want people being ground up by capitalism to feel bad if they couldn’t donate. What I do is a labor of love (as well as more than a little anti-capitalist spite) and a matter of educating people trapped in a Pig Empire propaganda model, about what rich people are doing to destroy them. And in return for that, over the past five years I have been insulted, defamed, suspended, subjected to various forms of online cyberattacks, mass reported, dogpiled and brigaded, demonized, put on numerous blacklists, put on neoliberal shitlists for targeted harassment, plagiarized from, threatened by pigs and even been put on several fascist kill lists; this shit is objectively not some kind of career choice and there’s literally no money in what I do.

Over that same period of time, I have repeatedly begged folks to help me fight censorship by sharing my work online and to sign up for notifications from my various websites in anticipation of the inevitable day when Twitter will notice I’ve gone over four thousand followers again, and nuke my latest account. You’ve read the numbers I’ve written in this article, you know full damn well that all of my begging and pleading has clearly accomplished nothing – so you tell me; would you quit? I think most people would and yes, I am sorely tempted to just call it a day, find someplace comfy and watch the world die. Obviously however, I’m not going to do that and you can tell that already because I bothered to actually write this article.

So here’s what I’m going to do; I’m going to keep writing and publishing my work everywhere but Twitter, and I’m going to make one last effort to plead with my readers to share my work online. First of all, I’m imploring you to simply sign up. If you’ve got a dollar per month to spare, sign up for my Patreon account updates; if you don’t, then sign up for email notifications here on ninaillingworth.com – it’s the bar on the right hand side of this very page; if you’re on Facebook, subscribe to my page, if you’re on Tumblr, Instagram or BlogSpot you can sign up there as well; the more the merrier and the harder it is for the big tech bros to shut me down. Then, I’m going to need you to hit that share button and keep hitting it until we win. Do you have a Twitter account? Are you on Facebook? Do you use Reddit? Snapchat? Instagram? Literally any other social media service? If so, then I am literally pleading with you to start sharing my articles online, of your own volition and help me punch through the net big tech and rich people are throwing around content like mine. Please, I’m begging you, stop being shy, stop worrying about what your Auntie will think and copy links to my articles to paste them online, and help me get my work out there; they cannot censor us all in silence, but I simply don’t have enough readers anymore for you to assume it’s fine because “someone else will share this one.”

Or don’t, and next year come this time I’ll be writing a goodbye post about how I tried my ass off for more than half a decade to beat the machine and lost, so that’s why I’m calling it a day and shutting down my websites. The choice really is yours, I can’t make you do it and I can’t do it for you, but one way or another something is going to change in 2021, or I’m going to find something else to do with my spare time before capitalism gets around to killing us all. That’s not an ultimatum, it’s just the truth; I am not going to beat billion dollar tech companies that want my voice silenced on my own, and we both know that.

Everyone says they want independent media voices who don’t lie to them; well, I’m exactly that kind of voice and I’m begging for your help. I don’t want your money, and I only want microseconds of your time. I cannot do it alone; if you value the writing I do, and the perspective I have to offer, then please for the love of god – share my articles online because mates, they clearly aren’t going to let me share them myself much longer.

 

• nina illingworth

 

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”