Twitter was once known as a decent free speech platform. It was a site where you could go global by using a simple hashtag, and with just a few retweets or likes you would end up in top tweets. The effect was that celebrities, politicians and whoever you were trying to reach, would see your tweets. For activists or journalists, Twitter was the go-to platform because of this. Far more powerful than alternatives like Facebook or Youtube, where you were really just dealing with your friends or friends of friends.
But things changed. There is a thought police now. Not only focussed on the things you say, but also on amplification methods. In my case this was the #WeAreAllAssange hashtag. A weekly Twitter storm I organized to be done every Friday, aimed to speak out for the innocent journalist Julian Assange, who is at this moment still in jail. It was a succesful attempt. With 1000s of people Tweeting every friday using that hashtag. And that's when it happened..
I reached out to Twitter after being suspended. People even started to do Twitter storms to bring me back. It took weeks for them to reply, and the reply was as expected: negative. They said I was "manipulating hashtags", but the only hashtag I was working on was the one I created myself. No details given, no further information.
And this wasn't all. I had other Twitter accounts, like an account for our Podcast. The second I made clear it was me on that account, they were suspended as well. With the words "trying to evade suspension by creating a new account". Simply not true, because some of these accounts were even older than the big one I lost.
So this is Twitter in 2021. After weeks of being silenced I managed to create another account, from a completely different location, with a new phone number, and I've been able to keep it up now for a while. Until of course, I do the wrong thing again, supporting the wrong person or spreading the wrong information.
You can find me there at https://twitter.com/censoredlubbers for as long as it lasts. But it only shows how we need decentralized social media like Hive, where the users are in control. I suggest to give priority to promoting platforms like this one, and make sure everyone moves to these safe places. Because the dissemination of independent information is under attack, and we are losing this fight right now.