Source: TheGrayzone.com
Following years of pressure from Israel lobbyists and British spooks, I was finally banned by Twitter/X. What does my removal say about Elon Musk, who flaunts his opposition to censorship, while promising to build an “everything app” where you could lose access to banking and messaging for violating dubious speech codes?
On February 17, I was suspended from Twitter/X without warning. The cause was mass-reporting by Zionist activists I’d offended. My removal was justified on the basis that I violated X’s “rules against violent speech.” Having endlessly condemned violence on the platform – in particular, the Gaza genocide – I’m flummoxed. Not least because a post from one of my Zionist detractors, which openly calls for me to be “battered on a weekly basis” over my political views, remains extant today.
Despite repeated requests for clarity from X, I have no idea whether I will ever be reinstated. In February, I received from “support” stating the suspension will only be reversed after three months. But just a few sentences later, the email contradicted itself, stating in closing that the ban would last just a month. Meanwhile, whenever I log into X, my profile appears to have zero followers or follows, I cannot view or search anyone’s tweets (including my own), and my DMs are inaccessible. Have they been erased? A landing page message reads:
“Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t post, repost, or like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts.”
In January 2024, X purged a number of prominent, predominantly left-wing users without warning or explanation. Their suspensions were lifted only after a deluge of complaints poured in to the personal account of Elon Musk, the libertarian tech maven and self-proclaimed free speech warrior who purchased Twitter with his personal fortune.
I am grateful that scores of X users have done the same following my own suspension. However, Musk has kept mum about my case. While I may not have as many followers as those abruptly defenestrated in January, my work has been widely shared on X, with some posts gaining millions of impressions. Most-viewed was my December 2023 revelation that an unadvertised and unnoticed Russian government plane was parked in Washington DC’s Dulles airport, a visit which likely represented the beginning of the Ukraine proxy war’s end.
This is quite a remarkable turnaround, given the concerted effort to suppress my Twitter output for as long as I have used the platform. One of the most illuminating disclosures in the Twitter Files exposed how the hyper-censorious regime that controlled the social media platform before Musk’s takeover required explicit authorization from managers to throttle accounts with more than 100,000 followers. Until then, engineers had free rein to covertly censor, suppress and shadowban anyone they wished, however they wished, without any oversight whatsoever.
This secret protocol offered a compelling explanation for curious developments regarding my own Twitter account in Summer 2022. For 18 months following my 2021 registration for Twitter, my follower count remained stubbornly low. This was until The Grayzone unmasked celebrity “journalist” Paul Mason as a British intelligence asset who directly coordinated attacks on anti-war figures and movements with a “friend” in the Foreign Office. I was the lead investigator on this series of reports.
The exposés generated significant attention the world over. My followers duly began multiplying by hundreds daily. Curiously, however, whenever I was a few dozen shy of 10,000, the total would crash back down. Evidently, Twitter staffers – and powerful forces breathing down their necks – were absolutely determined no one saw what I had to say.
Besides the exposes of Mason I worked on, there was my October 2019 report revealing Gordon Macmillan, a senior Twitter executive, as a member of 77th Brigade, the British Army’s shadowy psychological warfare unit which specializes in the weaponization of social media.
Had Macmillan and his fellow national security cadres exacted revenge on me when I was finally banned from Twitter/X? And what does my permanent removal say about X’s new boss, Elon, who advertises X as a platform that “champions free speech,” while promising to build an “everything app” where you could presumably lose access to your bank and messaging history for violating dubious speech codes?
Frozen out of ‘everything’ by Elon
Gordon MacMillan was one of many high-ranking staffers rightly sacked from the company upon Musk’s acquisition. From my perspective, while the owner’s politics couldn’t be further removed from my own, I have largely defended and embraced the changes he has implemented.
During an October 26, 2023 all-hands meeting at Twitter/X headquarters, Musk opened his remarks by announcing that he was “transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app.”
He vowed to establish “a single application that encompasses everything. You can do payments, messages, video, calling, whatever you’d like, from one single, convenient place.”
“We just don’t have that,” Musk lamented. “It doesn’t exist outside of China.”
I might not have been using X for “everything”, but it was an extremely useful tool in my personal and professional life. My banning offered me a stark illustration of the dangers of relying so heavily on a privately-owned social media app, especially one that provides features that are almost essential in a digital world….