Over 20,000 tweets without a single timeout, now I’m banned. Shadowbanning and the culture war.

“ Think not that I came to send peace on the earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law: and a man’s foes’ shall be they of his own household.” Matthew 10:34–36
Changing technologies change the way we understand, apply and interpret the law. With the advent of the telephone, and the ensuing conflicts between the private corporations created many new problems that required us to rethink our notions of private and public, rights and privileges, and the borders of this new space. There has been a long argument about whether or not telephones are considered a public utility. The fight for net neutrality is a more contemporary example.
Today, in the era of social media, we are finding platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are providing something much more fundamental and crucial than simply a website experience. These platforms have essentially become the new public square, the space in which people may participate in what Kant called the Public use of Reason.
This is absolutely vital for society because it is here that people are able to collectively think and engage in a search for truth. It is clear that in every oppressive, tyrannical society, the strict control or destruction of these spaces were precursors to the great horrors of the twentieth century.
This Public use of Reason was absolutely crucial for our founding fathers and the development of the Bill of Rights.
Recently, many people, largely conservatives, have accused big tech companies such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook in pushing an agenda. These tech companies, they claim, are run by a bunch of liberals who have all gone through the same university system of indoctrination and have the same cookie cutter ideology.
Members of the Intellectual Dark Web have spoken out a great deal about this cultural climate, rooted in universities and spread into cloistered havens for hip young professionals. The defining features of this cultural climate are: an unquestionable allegiance to liberal progressive ideology, what has been known as “Social Justice Warrior” identity politics. No dissent or counterarguments are allowed in this safe space, disagreement is violence.
Are these tech leaders afraid of conservative ideas? I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Many of the people who have faced silencing or censorship have actually been on the far left, such as the excellent twitter accounts @blacksocialists and @IPM_Main . So what are they truly so afraid of? These guardians of the status quo seem to fear one thing: The Truth
As the scripture at the start of this article explains, the difficult thing about the Truth is that it divides, it hurts, it causes conflict, it creates change. This is exactly the opposite of what you want if your ideology is aimed at pure self preservation and reproducing the conditions necessary to sustain the current order.
When I first heard about “shadowbanning”, it came as no surprise to me. I have long suspected that my tweets were being made less visible through algorithms. I am not some huge million follower account, but I was very proud of the followers I did have. I was quite certain that far more people had blocked me on twitter than the roughly one thousand who followed me. Still, those included many public figures, journalists, authors, professors and organizations. Free speech and civil discourse was central to my twitter ethics. I made it known that I never blocked or muted any accounts, I would engage anyone who tried to argue with me in good faith, and I would always remain civil and polite in my tweets. It was important to me to demonstrate and set a standard for how to save the discourse from the most toxic elements.
I am a Christian, and was entirely unapologetic about my faith. I am also a radical leftist, you can call me a communist if we have a discussion about the meaning of that word. Clearly, the juxtaposition of these two alignments caused a lot of friction. Many a feather was ruffled when I dropped scorching hot takes such as “I respect Vice President Pence for being faithful to his wife in this climate of sex scandals” or “Ben Shapiro is great at debating and the left can learn from him”. Those tweets got me thoroughly dragged on twitter, ostracized by left communities, and attacked as an alt right fascist etc.
I also said things that made conservatives upset (but I must admit, they did not behave with such vitriol at views they disagreed with), such as telling the truth about Assata Shakur being falsely accused of committing a dozen crimes, taken to trial and exonerated on all charges over a period of several years, until the FBI gave up on trying to frame her and simply put an open hit on her. Yes, the police said that she was an “armed and dangerous criminal” (even using a photo of a bank robber, which she was acquitted of, on a wanted poster) and said she should be shot on sight. She was seen by a police officer and she was shot. While she lay dying, suffering nerve damage so bad that neurologists stated in court that she could not have fired a gun, her friends returned fire on the police officer. She was charged and found guilty of felony murder when the cops, the judge, the jury, and everyone else knew full well she did not pull that trigger.
I spoke about the long history of COINTELPRO, the official government project headed by the FBI aimed at targeting people with problematic political views. Once identified, the FBI engaged in subverting, sabotaging, infiltrating, framing and even murdering political dissidents.
With my twitter account dedicated to sharing such bold, difficult truths, I always suspected that I might become a target of censorship. I began to study my twitter analytics data. I discovered interesting trends. I would tweet using trending hashtags or reply to enormous accounts and find that they would only gather a few dozen impressions, while tweets I used to make when I first started my account would easily get thousands. Shortly before being banned, I posted a particularly spicy tweet and after a while when I clicked the analytics button I discovered it had two engagements and no impressions were even recorded.

I used twitter a lot, I had over twenty two thousand tweets posted and I have never once gotten even a 12 hour timeout. One day my account simply froze. I had been locked out. I received an email saying I was suspended. I have heard from friends about the process of getting suspended, where twitter shows you the tweet that violated their rules and gives you an opportunity to delete or change it to restore your account. Nothing like this happened for me. I was never shown any tweet that violated any rules. I appealed my suspension and got an automated reply, saying that I had been suspended for making threats of violence. I was shook.
This was so outside of my character that it made no sense, and there was no tweet to even look at. I began to think back at all of my twitter activity. I was also in a few group dm’s with various members of “weird twitter” where we chatted and told casual jokes. The only instance I could recall was when one of these weird twitter troll was roasting me by insulting my wife, to which I jokingly replied with a challenge to engage in fisticuffs. In the context of this group dm, full of trolling, braggadocios claims and meme wars, I did not think this comment would warrant an insta-ban with no chance for correction.
After I was suspended, the person I was teasing expressed his sincere regret, saying he didn’t believe anyone could get banned for that. He said that kind of thing is like a 12 hour time out. I wouldn’t know, I have never had any sort of reprimand from twitter.
This made me wonder, was I already deemed “problematic” by the thought police on twitter? Were they shadowbanning me and waiting for any minor trivial slip up in order to throw their harshest possible punishment? I don’t know, but compare my permanent suspension to other twitter accounts such as @drdavidduke which is active or simply search twitter for terms like “i will punch” to see volumes of content that seems to flagrently break the same rule I was accused of breaking (but never shown evidence for, or offered a chance to correct).
My Twitter account was @commieflanders , and if you are sick of this kind of behavior from these corporate behemoths, let @jack know!
I’m beginning to wonder if platforms like twitter should be treated as public utilities, and regulated to protect the interests of the commons.
