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Twitter is done. After the suspension of then-sitting President Trump and successive ban waves, it’s obvious that Right-wingers have no future on the platform. What began as Left and Right competing for audiences on Twitter has ended with Twitter itself flexing its soy-infused muscles to purge all but a small and carefully curated number of high-profile Right-wing accounts. At one time it may have been possible to institute legal controls on digital communications infrastructure companies (so-called “big tech”) to ensure transparency, accountability, and freedom of speech and expression, including political or “hate” speech. Now that Twitter has spent all its remaining credibility getting Biden across the finish line and into the White House, that window is fully closed. Because of shadow banning, deboosting, and other harder-to-identify data manipulation, we have to assume that the outreach benefit of maintaining a presence on Twitter is negligible and that all Right-wing accounts are being kept in a digital ghetto of preaching to the converted. The only remaining utility Twitter has is to make a list of the gravestones to try and find the same people on Gab.
In a way, the decision has been made for us. If Twitter wants to be a space where there is no political debate outside of an ever-tightening noose, that is fine. It will simply cease to be relevant or meaningful to the majority of politically engaged users, both Left and Right, and hasten the day the platform dies by becoming a 280-character variation of print newspapers. The time has come for the Right-wing to lock horns with Twitter, not from inside the platform where our social networks can be monitored and viciously pruned by the ADL working hand-in-glove with Twitter Commissars, but from a competing platform, by which I mean Gab. With every cycle of “find my frens,” the time, energy, and accumulated social capital of Right-wing Twitter users are intentionally thrown away. It is completely pointless to continue trying to build up the next sandcastle only for it to be knocked down again on a whim.
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Arguably, the entire purpose of Twitter is to bait Right-wingers into using it to ensure that our network never grows beyond their Petri dish. They can already count on the votes and physical obedience of their core constituents to inject themselves with experimental vaccines and violently attack mask non-wearers. Part of the real value of Twitter to the Left is the data provided by the aggregate Right-wing use of the site, allowing them to identify who is posting from where, and which memes, videos, and articles have the most traction and impact. By using Twitter, Right-wingers allow the Left to analyze how best to smother our baby in the crib. It’s all well and good starting fires on their platform that will take a few clicks of the Twitter Trust & Safety team to put out with a mass suspension, but the effort expenditure clearly favors Twitter. It’s just not worth it to carry on trying to meme to an audience that Twitter will never let you reach. Individually, every Right-winger appears to be incentivized to remain on Twitter. This is where they can find a (seemingly) larger immediate audience, despite the setbacks of harassment and suspensions. But on the whole, this individualism is robbing individual Right-wing users of their future on the web.
I hope this will be the one and only time I ask Right-wingers to change their main social media platform. With every great migration, our social network gets weaker before it becomes stronger by flourishing in the more favorable conditions. Some users will remain and won’t want to leave their audience, arguing that they are in a better position with the devil they know. Other useful individuals will peel off and join other spaces, where their social capital and exclusive stream of audience-attracting content is then squandered on far more niche sites that are not challengers to Twitter but its satellites. What matters when challenging a monopoly is momentum and picking up the accumulated audiences of vast numbers of content creators and conversationalists. Gab has an established personality and known, easily marketed brand and offers the necessary social interaction that commercially slanted publishing platforms don’t. It’s meme-friendly whilst being a hub of actual people rather than an anonymous message board. Everyone knows the green frog, and as the platform hasn’t fully taken off yet, we can hijack it on the runway.
We have to act as one bloc. Twitter is testing us to see if we have the solidarity with each other to challenge their platform by investing ourselves in and taking control of a competitor, or whether we will keep going back for another beating out of a masochistic urge to make yet another faux-noble last stand. Torba’s personal Warhammer-themed variant of Christian Crusaderism will put off some, and to those people, I am asking please, put aside your doubts, let him be eccentric, and exploit the neutrality that Gab is offering to do your own thing and be yourself. Twitter is deeply enmeshed in the alphabet soup of deep state intelligence agencies and Jewish-run NGOs, and anyone who is still there is offering themselves up as a plaything.
The only way to win this game is to be an uncompromising minority which forces everyone else to behave on our terms — by posting exclusively to Gab, others will have to sign up to Gab to follow, and in turn, this snowball will become an avalanche that will flatten Twitter’s ability to control the conversation (the wider Right is being forced off Twitter anyway, so let them follow us to a space where we can freely disabuse them of their cuckservatism). Small accounts should migrate immediately to Gab, creating a sizeable new audience that can rival Twitter for engagement and support. Big accounts, many of which are well-known outside of Twitter and aren’t that dependent on it, should make Twitter pay by switching to this new, unthrottled audience and bringing in more moderates. Eventually, even Leftists will follow for want of an argument. Torba is a businessman who wants to be a heavyweight in the world of digital infrastructure, and if we become the driving force of his site, we can leverage this dependency to make sure we get the transparency, platform protections, and utilities that we want.
Twitter needs us, but we do not need them. If they didn’t need us to support their platform, there wouldn’t be a single Right-winger with an account remaining. Their aim is to keep a pet population of implicit White Nationalists, not so many that we can achieve a critical mass on their platform, but enough that challengers are bled out. It’s a toxic relationship and it’s time to walk away.
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18 comments
Never had a Twitter. Always thought it was stupid, and that “right wingers” putting energy into a platform controlled by progressives in Silicon Valley (and by extension the US surveillance state) was crazy. “You’re censoring us!”. WTF did think would happen? Don’t fall into the trap that conservatives do where they think politics is some college debate club. It’s not. It’s about power. And when you sign up for an account on the enemies platform you are choosing to become controlled opposition. The fact Trump stayed on there and promoted it for 4 years was pathetic TBH.
FPBP, couldn’t have said it better.
Ditto.
Right on! I have barely ever been on Twitter. IMO, it’s as much of a waste of time as watching porn or being a “gamer”. There are too many books to read – not to mention too many brainclouded whites to Awaken!!
That said, I did, too, always think that Trump should have taken his hundred million followers to Gab, once I’d heard of it. Twitter was always nasty, from what I’d heard from friends who did follow or use it, and Trump was boosting them by his presence. (Is Trump on Gab now??)
Gab appears to have been hacked again today. Our enemies know where we (already) are and are trying to destroy it (and us). At some point, we’re all going to be doxxed. Best to just accept this fact and move on.
In America, ownership is 90 percent of the Law.
If anyone wants to setup their soapbox on someone else’s front lawn, they can expect to be kicked off if the owner does not like their speech.
For years the Right has been foolishly depending on the tender mercies of the Left to please, please give us just a tiny spot on their PRIVATE front-lawn media platforms. In the name of Free-speech and all that.
What an embarrassing bunch of hand-wringing crap we now hear from the kicked-off Right.
These platform bans were plainly inevitable years ago. So it is absurd for the Right to be boo-hooing about it now.
In our heart of hearts, we all know that neither the Right nor the Left has EVER given a rat’s-ass about each others’ Free Speech.
In 1965 the Left started the “Free Speech Movement” on college campuses. Where is the free Speech on college campuses now, and do you see the Left lamenting its absence??
“Free Speech” is, and always has been, a mere moral-rhetorical accusatory fire-ball to throw at the other side. Nobody ever sincerely believed in it.
There is no doubt that both sides would ruthlessly silence the other if they could politically get away with it. Which the Left now can. Welcome to the deadly new political world we are in.
I was suspended by Twitter for the first time on Feb 27th. My account was not mainly political in its content, but was certainly adjacent to Nahtsee Twitter in many ways that could have been detected algorithmically.
The reason given for my suspension was “platform manipulation/spam” as detailed here: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/platform-manipulation
To date, Twitter has been wholly unresponsive to my appeal for reinstatement.
If anyone else was caught up in the recent “purge”, perhaps you can tell me if your experience matches my own, in particular the reasons given for suspension.
I have been purged as well recently with the “platform manipulation/spam” pretext, but no details were given and my appeal has been ignored so far. It goes without saying that I haven’t violated any of the rules listed on the “platform manipulation” site. I have personally heard of a few others who have received that treatment. My follower count was ca. 8,500. I was openly political, but very careful about “hate speech” etc.
Curiously, the same tactic was used in January in India to suspend hundreds of government critics:
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/twitter-suspends-at-least-500-accounts-for-spam-manipulation-101611773099581.html
I was suspended at the same time for the same reason, filed my appeal with no response and promptly made a new account but it is increasingly not worth trying to reconnect with the same people over and over (on my sixth account currently)
Word on Gab from Genie and other big accounts is that this is the generic, meaningless reason given to everyone.
I was banned a few days later for the same reason, though I certainly never violated any rules. My appeal has received no response.
The problem is that Gab has been hacked and all obtained personal data are in the hands of the enemy ready for leaking. It also seems that Torba hasn’t taken enough precautions to prevent this. Gab doesn’t look like a safe and reliable alternative right now. I have avoided it so far because preaching to the choir is a bit boring and pointless.
Everyone still left on Twitter should start trolling them with Al Jolson videos singing “Goodbye Birdie, Goodbye!”
I’m not signing up for a platform where weev is banned and the LARPer owner spends more time griping about “demon tranny hackers” than fixing the problem that allowed said demon tranny hackers to access (admittedly basic) information in the first place.
If you don’t know by no that the totalitarian Twitter is a trap for conservatives then you deserve whatever you get by posting there behind enemy lines.
I’m curious what you mean by “trap”. Trap in what way?
My twitter account I started when I was 12 (but which I’ve only been using for a few years) was finally suspended for good in the recent banwave & many others in the WN anitwitter sphere whose accounts were not explicitly political were wiped out as well.
I have opted to move over to the fediverse instead of gab and it is very cozy. I honestly don’t have much faith in Torba and his goofy fuentes-esque christian crusader rhetoric is telling about how serious he is about making gab something other than a boomer ghetto. That said I would be pleased if he re-federated Gab with the dissident fediverse so we could all be together. Whether or not we flock to the same microblogging platform is less important than that we collectively escape a ghey platform that perpetually holocausts us off of it. And right now fedi has a thriving anime nazi community for whoever wants to join.
Haha poor Jack Dorsey tried to do the same here in India, and our Hindu nationalist leader Modi issued a stern warning and they had to reverse the bans within hours.
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