“X” is Still Twitter

By
eric
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40
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Elon Musk says he is for free speech but X – which is what Musk rebranded Twitter as when he bought it – still suppresses speech.

So it’s still the same old Twitter.

With a worrisome difference. Many people have been being gulled into believing X is different. At least when it was Twitter, everyone knew that the Leftists who controlled it were not in favor of free speech if it disagreed with or questioned anything the Left believed.

I myself believed – or rather, hoped – that X would be what Twitter wasn’t. My hopes have been dashed. X continues to shadow ban the links and comments I post, meaning almost no one sees my comments or posts but I am left with the impression that I posted links and comments, having posted them.

It is very clever.

You think you’re communicating with the people who have followed you but your followers have no idea you’ve just tried to communicate because they don’t receive notifications you’ve posted. These are turned off – and on – by the Al Gore Ithym used by X/Twitter to discreetly suppress speech by (in effect) having you talk to the hand.

Keep in mind this “hand” is an intercession between you and the people who want to communicate with you; i.e., the people who follow you. Twitter/X – it goes both ways because it’s the same thing, regardless – decides that whatever you just posted is something those who follow you ought not to see.

And so, they don’t. 

I have a bigger window into how it works because I’m more visible – being a commentator with a fairly large audience. I can tell when I’m being shadow banned because it’s obvious. When the Al Gore Ithym allows people to see what I’ve posted, I’ll get 20-plus notifications within 24 hours. Next day, the Al Gore Ithym is on – and I get none. Zero. This is improbable as a natural ebb and flow of response. Three or four vs. 20-plus, ok. Maybe.

But not 20-plus one day and zero the next.

This occurs regularly. It isn’t just happenstance. Because it can’t be happenstance.

I have also noticed – kluge hans – that when I first load X/Twitter, I will momentarily see notifications pending that then disappear, at the same moment an obnoxious pop-up appears, advising me that I am “in control” of how many ads Twitter/X pelts me with by electing to choose which ads I am pelted with. I just close X/Twitter (without clicking which ads I “choose” to be pelted with) and reload.

Voila! The notifications reappear.

When they’re allowed to.

Speaking of allowed – as regards free speech . . .

When I attempted to speak freely in response to a comment (and video clip) left by the actor James Woods showing a young thug “performing” at an airport terminal while Face Diapered submissives inertly watched, my speech was overtly suppressed.

“Your post was detected by our systems and has had its visibility limited for violating X rules.”

These rules say I may not “Promote violence” – which I never have – nor “threaten” – which I didn’t and never have – or “harass on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or serious disease.”

My italics added.

“Harass” – in the lexicon of the Left, which is obviously still controlled by the Left – is taken as functionally synonymous with annoy. As in, a Leftist doesn’t like it. It is not enough – for the Left – that no one is obliged to read that which is annoying to the Left (or to anyone, for that matter). Nor that anyone who is annoyed can respond. That is to say, can speak freely.

The person who annoys the sensibilities of the Left is guilty of harassment and must be suppressed.

Never mind I didn’t follow anyone around berating them much less threatening them.

But the real point here is the implicit one. If Twitter/X can (and has) “limited the reach” of one of my posts, it can “limit the reach” of any of them. Anytime it likes. Just without the courtesy of a notification.

So much for “X” being a Free Speech Zone. And so much for Musk and his pretending to be an advocate for the same.

. . .

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40 COMMENTS

  3. X is the Roman numeral for 10. Makes you wonder about it all.

    The Appian Way had two foot curbs and a sixteen inch road bed. The chariot needs a better road surface, beats all the ruts cut into the dirt. Need lots of people doing the job, forced labor can get ‘er done.

    Spartacus hung out there for a while. If you are a gladiator in Rome and defy the powers that be, you’ll pay a high price.

    Crassus had it in for Spartacus.

    6000 crosses, 6000 crucified rebellious renegades tired of killing each other in the Colosseum, gets old after a couple of hundred years of it.

    Today, Gazans know how it feels. Elon, like Crassus, is there in Israel to celebrate the massacre.

    Crassus was the wealthiest Roman evah.

    Empires fall from grace, pride goeth before fall.

    The Jews are drinking the Sampson kool-aid hand over fist, and do so at their own risk.

    It is no solution, it is the problem.

  4. Not news to me. I had a Twitter account for years but seldom used it as I wasn’t motivated to adapt to the interface. When Musk bought it I became motivated to check it out and see how it evolved. I lasted about 6 weeks before I was banned. I was following some Conservative “influencer” (whose name I don’t recall) with a large following to stay up with that end of the spectrum. She opined that any Republican who voted for the Omnibus spending bill should be primary’d out at the next election.
    Not that bad of an idea; never happen though, so I responded exactly as follows:
    “Tarred and feathered.”
    Instant ban for advocating violence.
    Zero tolerance, don’t you know.
    Well, I was TOTALLY unrepentant so Twitter and I have parted ways.

    • Interesting. I’ve zero experience with the Twit-universe.

      “Tarred and feathered.”

      … It’s like little girls, helicopter parents & jacked up cops & teachers… oh, nevermind.

      Carry on.

    • Hi Cantinista,

      Yup. And – in your case – it was just an expression, long in use. To equate that with “threats” or (even more absurdly) “advocating violence” is obviously an excuse to suppress speech. Musk says he’s for free speech, but if he is, then why is X the same old Twitter?

  5. I was banned for saying I would break a woman’s jaw if she defaced a Monet in front of me – ala ecoterrorists. No warning, nothing, permanent ban. Its not even a threat directed at anyone, just a general statement. It’s not even true, it’s hyperbole. I would likely just push the moron. Free speech my ass.

  6. EE-Ron Musk is another trump figure. He’s in the club and part of the scam but he’ll run off script enough that people think he’s “one of them.” He’s simply the new slave master who instead of starvung and whipping the slaves until they pass out, a couple times a week allows everybody to have a piece of cake and a cold drink, maybe a high five and an encouraging (based) word while still corralling them around his little electronic minimum security information ghetto.

    Free range prisoners are the most compliant and easiest to control.

    Gab social seems to b the closest thing to an actual free speech platform

  8. I refuse to sign up for Twitter or Tik Tok and have not posted on Facebook or Instagram in over 10 years. I understand the frustration of well intentioned people wanting a wider audience but know that buying into Twitter X or any main stream news outlet is playing right into the hands of the Left. These companies collect information about me which they profit from but do not pay me a dime for. If they had to pay people for all their data this would stop right away.

  9. Agent Musk is a construct of the state, an actor, a total farcical character. His narrative was loosely constructed around that of Tony Stark character from Iron Man, also a state media production.

    I’ve had the fortune to work with many brilliant people and business owners over the past few decades. To start and run just one company takes all the hours in a day and most business owners are working 20+ of those hours….

    Yet Agent musk has the time to start and run 4 completely diverse companies?

    Listen closely to both his interviews on Rogan. The man just isn’t that bright. Low three digit IQ for sure but there’s no depth, no passion, nothing there beyond the label.

    He’s a skin suit draped over massive government spending cloaked as private business.

    And this was made clear with his recent CEO pick for Twatter.

    • Hi David,

      This is an interesting observation – about how it’s possible for anyone (singular, one person) to run several huge companies and have time to sit around smoking pot with Joe Rogan, etc. Is it possible? Anyone who owns/runs their own small business already knows how much time – every day – is spent running that one business. I myself am at my desk from appx. 4 in the morning to early evening. I take some breaks in between, of course. But the point is my work is almost all-encompassing. And “all” I’m doing is researching/writing a couple of columns each day, maybe doing a radio spot and running the site, generally. I cannot fathom running (or even just supervising) a corporation, even just one. Let alone several. Perhaps it is done via delegation?

      And I take your point regardingMusk, himself. I’ve listened to him being interviewed many times and he seems to me exceptionally average. I’ve not heard him say anything particularly insightful and he’s not even very articulate. But perhaps that is a smart man’s way to lull others into believing he’s not as smart as he actually is?

  12. Well at least Musk told the advertisers, including Disney, who tried to blackmail him into imposing greater speech restrictions on Twitter, to fuck off! If nothing else, it was a nice thing to hear this. And Twitter is a lot more of a free speech platform now than it was before Musk bought it. Alex Jones has just returned to Twitter, as has Tucker Carlson. And Musk has actually come out in favor of people having more children as an essential thing for the future of a healthy, dynamic society. This goes against all of the eugenics depopulation bullshit being pushed by the humanity hating WEF.

  13. Maybe their shadow banning you Eric because your tweets are effective? If “they” say we’ll all be driving electric cars in 15 years and you point out that there is not enough power generating capacity or homes equipped to charge them maybe people will stand up before it’s too late.

    Perhaps having David Knight interviewing you and Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute on the EV future would help.

    Don’t forget if you don’t own and control it then you’re a supplicant begging for permission.

  14. You’re message needs to be heard, Eric. I don’t see anything wrong with utilizing every means possible to get the message out. Everyone knows Twitter is under government surveillance and control. Use it to rub their noses in it as often as possible while directing the like-minded to your website.

  15. The rush to get online is the problem. People were excited to take part in the Internet, but they didn’t want to learn a lot of archaic Unix commands. Once the HTTP protocol was established and Mosaic browser created, the Internet changed fundamentally from a peer-to-peer network to client server. This fit in well with the dial-up modem, since most people didn’t spring for a second phone line, and the telcos were pushing crazy expensive ISDN at the time. So millions of people started straining servers, as the Internet became a cheaper way to distribute AOL and Compuserve. ISPs would include “webspace” for their customers, where they could put up their little home pages, but that was hard too. Microsoft got into the act with Frontpage, but then didn’t promote it and made it do a bunch of proprietary stuff with IIS services, which most ISPs weren’t running. So companies like My Space and Geocities tried to make it easy, outside of your ISPs webspaces.

    Then came Facebook. This caught on in Europe because Facebook had an app that came with Nokia phones. This along with the new GSM data standard made it easy to post activity and doom scroll while on the Tube. It took a lot longer to catch on in the US because we were mostly still using PCs and hadn’t picked up on feature phones just yet. Again, using phones with intermittent cellular connections isn’t conducive to peer-to-peer systems, so the client server model became more standard.

    The outlier to all this is email. For whatever reason email servers stayed decentralized, probably because of business users. Yes, we have email clients and servers, but it is technically, and even somewhat practically feasible to run your own mail server, in your house (heck, if the Clintons could do it, anyone can). Even attempts to corner the email market like Gmail and Office365 are only a fraction of email servers in the world.

    Funny thing is, no one thinks distributed email servers is odd or hard. There’s all sorts of back office automation that takes place between clients and servers that basically just mean you log in with a user/pass just like logging in here. It just works. Yet when someone might consider a distributed system to replace Facebook or Twitter, well, that’s too hard! But they do exist. You just have to drag your followers with you, and most of them aren’t coming along until everyone else does. Kinda like being a libertarian.

    Apple missed a golden opportunity to fix all this stuff when they came up with iCloud. They could have leveraged their existing Airport router into a “HomeCloud” where all your online presence lived, on a peer-to-peer sharing network. Inside your house, not in the hands of third parties.

    What might have been…

    • Facebook and Twitter were about the dopamine hit from the web site. Both companies employ staff psychologists to keep users hooked and returning for more.

      Twitter, at its core, is a fairly basic system. The complexity comes from the censorship.

      Twitter also had an iPhone app early on via acquisition of Tweetie.

      Early iPhone apps were terrible and, until the 3GS, subject to crashing constantly due to the low RAM available on the platform and complicated memory management. Buying Tweetie allowed the company to deliver that mobile experience without their own developers facing the iOS developer learning curve which was steep prior to iOS 5 and iPhone 4.

      • Imagine if we all paid a service provider to run our microblogging site? Then imagine if there were an application that used RSS or some other protocol to gather all the feeds from our friends and family into a unified timeline. How much would you pay for such a service? How much would your friends and family?

        Turns out, we’ll never know. I’d be happy to pay someone the $15-20 annually that Facebook makes from presenting advertising to me. Heck, I might pay 10X that amount, if it means I won’t get annoyed by algorithms designed to keep me scrolling. Most of which are so basic that I get “suggestions” to follow young women whose only redeeming quality seems to be that they’re young and physically attractive.

  16. Facebook engaged in some unusual activity about a week ago. They or their Algorithms removed content from accounts that allegedly went against community standards on spam without specifying what posts or content “Went against community standards on spam”. And then just days later I read a piece by Naomi Wolf (who has done some brilliant work on reporting the COVID crap and the Pfizer documents that the company & the FDA wanted to keep hidden for 75 years) stating that her company, DailyClout, was removed from Facebook & Instagram all at once, which I found suspicious. Is the establishment going to try to scare us over a man made virus once again, this time to KEEP a senile old man (Joe Biden) in office as well as KEEPING Orange Man from getting back into office after successfully using COVID hysteria to get Trump out of office in 2020?

      • I agree with you, Philo. Everybody, and I mean everybody (even the crazy Asses), feel something is amidst. We all are tip toeing into 2024 because we know the bogeyman is around the corner.

        I had a bad feeling going into 2020. I have the same feeling going into 2024 and from everybody I have talked to, I am not alone. People are jumpy and scared. Apparently, over a trillion dollars has disappeared from Americans savings accounts since 2021. Yes, some of it was spent, but a lot of it is under the mattress. There is a reason there is no pasta on the shelves and sugar is hard to find.

        • Yes RG! What is going on with the pasta? I walk down that aisle and feel like I time-traveled back to the Soviet Union in the 70’s and 80’s. Blank shelves and not even a nice note telling me to come back some other day and stand in line for your rationed spaghetti.

    • If we’ve learned anything from history it’s that the PTBs never run the same scam twice in a row. Too many expect Covid Part 2…which is why it won’t happen next year or anytime soon.

  17. Elon Musk following through on buying Twitter was another distraction to deflect attention away from the failure of the Cybertruck and the rockets which keep going splody and ruining the ecosystem down at Boca Chica.

    Plus, @Eric, Twitter/X probably has a whole new reason to keep an eye on your particular account under the new ownership. You aren’t a member of the car journalism flock interested in selling magazines as impulse buys at airport newsstands.

  18. Why, Eric, why? I can understand the need to broaden your audience, but government controlled media isn’t going to let you…at least on their platforms.

    Do we really believe that Musk does not have handlers? How much money do taxpayers allocate to Tesla and Space X on an annual basis? If Uncle Sam comes knocking Musk will comply. Because, billions are at stake.

    Facebook, Twitter (I refuse to call it X), YouTube, etc. are overseen by the hand of Big Brother. We need to stop believing what people say and watch what they do. Musk preaches some great rhetoric from time to time, but he doesn’t practice it. You are seeing this for yourself. You are being sanctioned for things that are not remotely threatening. They will not allow you to heard, just as they will not allow any of us that go against the narrative to be. Critical thinking makes people think question. In the eyes of government, media, and large corporations that is a sin. If the populace cannot be contained then it is extremely dangerous for the puppeteers in charge. Stifle dissent. Paint them as conspiracy theorists and destroyers of democracy. The average citizen is too stupid to connect the dots that the only people promoting the destruction of our Republic are those that proclaim to be saving it.

    • I hear you, RG –

      It is very frustrating. You ask why do I bother? Because the bulk of the people who are at least potentially on our side adamantly insist on “Tweeting.” I wish they’d give that up and turn to places such as this place (and others that actually do support free speech) and thereby cause Twitter, et al, to wilt into irrelevance. But, most won’t. Which, I realize, says it’s probably not worth trying to reach them.

      Sigh. It’s a hard morning, this morning. I may just go back to bed for awhile.

      • Go back to bed for a few hours. Usually, a couple hours of rest clears the head and allows you to reassess the situation at hand.

        I wish I could. I am on my second cup of coffee and still haven’t moved from my leather chair. If I didn’t have two projects sitting on my desk with crucial deadlines I would still be under the covers.

  19. What else should one expect from one who made billions off the government teat? Musk often speaks in opposition to that government, but what he does, not so much.

  20. ‘It’s still the same old Twitter.’ — eric

    Twiiter/X and Facebook are both playgrounds for spooks. CIA, FBI and DHS are having a field day with their Big Data apps in these giant sandboxes, IDing and profiling participants. As one commentator puts it:

    ‘Twitter runs like the DMV. Why? Because Twitter has to remain DHS compatible. Why does Twitter need to remain DHS compatible? Because private company Twitter/X has data processing interfaces with the DHS surveillance system. Making sense now?’

    http://tinyurl.com/ac996drv

    This presents an inherent problem for those such as Eric, who want wider visibility but are engaged in social commentary.

    I do read posts on Twitter/X, but would never register for an account there. Even under an alias, the spooks (whose unconstitutional Section 702 spying was just re-authorized in the NDAA yesterday) will associate one’s IP address and other clues to assign an identity.

    Welcome to East Germany, comrade. Our surveillance file on you is unusually voluminous. Unterstützen Sie das Heimatland?

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