Twitter and Periscope Shadowban Update

This article originally appeared on this site.

I was just on Periscope, the streaming app owned by Twitter. The running count for number of live followers on my session dropped from over a thousand to zero for no obvious reason, even though plenty of people were still on and interacting with me. At a count of over a thousand viewers I would have been close to the #1 stream on the app at that moment.

I restarted the session in case it was a technical error. Once again, as soon as I started talking about how Trump could win the race, my viewer count artificially dropped to zero, while at the same time there were plenty of actual people on my session interacting with me.

A high viewer count is what makes a Periscope session look appealing to other viewers. The sessions with a lot of viewers get featured and attract even more viewers to see what is happening. Whatever suppressed my viewer count had the effect of reducing the number of new people coming to see me.

I don’t have confirmation that Twitter is shadowbanning me. All I know is that my followers say they don’t always see my posts unless they go to my feed directly. Hundreds of people might be wrong (it happens) but the odds are against it.

Likewise, my problem with Periscope might be a technical glitch. (It happens.) But again, that would be a large coincidence.

As I said before, if Twitter is suppressing my political speech, I consider it moral treason against the people of the United States even if it is allowed under their terms of service, and even though it is technically legal. I hope I’m wrong, and that my problems are simply technical in nature. Because if Twitter is doing what people say they are doing, and suppressing certain types of speech, the company needs to die for the good of the Republic. 

And I trust that it will.

By the way, Twitter did go down yesterday from a Distributed Denial of Service attack that affected other big services as well. It happened on the very day I said I would destroy Twitter if I didn’t hear back about my shadowbanning question. That was just a funny coincidence. (It happens.)

If you like freedom of speech, you might like my book because you also like coffee.

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