100% Confirmed Shadowban on X

Elon Musk is a Great Champion of Free Speech

I’ve always been skeptical of Elon Musk. Many people were skeptical of Musk because he’s rich. I could care less that he’s rich. I was skeptical of him because it’s always been clear to me how little regard he has for telling the truth.

The Path of Exile scandal was the tipping point for me. At that point, my Musk neutrality was fully broken. Any respect I had for Musk’s accomplishments — which I may still recognize as worthy of praise — was overshadowed by his blatant disdain for the truth. Not only did Musk lie about his video game prowess, he actively punished anyone who pointed out the obvious facts: his PoE account was boosted and he didn’t understand basic game mechanics.

Lying about being good at a video game for internet clout while being the wealthiest, most conventionally successful person in the world is just… weird. And not weird in a quirky, adorable way. That kind of insecurity coupled with that much wealth and power is weird in a pathetic, pitiable way.

I reserved judgement when he bought X because I thought his regime would at least represent an improvement over the woke mob that previously ruled Twitterspace. I was wrong. We quickly learned, most especially through his beef with Substack, that Elon Musk is an ego-driven man baby who can’t abide challenge, disagreement, or anything remotely resembling criticism. I’d rather be ruled over by poor woke ideologues than a rich man baby.

I’d been wondering for a while why everything I posted on X was getting such poor engagement. I deleted most of my posts after a few days because I thought they must be so boring or off-putting that they were simply ignored. It was actually kind of distressing to think that I was so out of touch with my own audience that nothing I had to say drove any engagement.

A successful post would get 1-2 likes, no replies, a couple hundred views or so, then silence. This was very different from my experience on pre-Musk twitter, where my tweet engagement was typical for an account of my size. Until yesterday, it never occurred to me that I might be shadowbanned. I was under the impression that X was now a platform dedicated to free speech, so why should I have worried about that? I knew and accepted that they would throttle posts that mentioned Substack articles. I never suspected that X would bar me from engaging with my audience at all.

But after watching a couple of posts flop, I developed a hunch and decided to run my numbers through chatGPT. I don’t trust chatGPT to provide definitive answers because it’s too prone to hallucination, but I thought it might be able to confirm whether or not my growing suspicion was mere paranoia.

According to chatGPT, I’m not paranoid. I fed it the numbers of a recent post and it confirmed that the tweet was massively underperforming compared to similar posts from similar-sized accounts. The post contained no links and so shouldn’t have been throttled for that reason.

Ok, so I at least have the right to be suspicious at this point. I fed chatGPT another tweet with no links and was told that it had also massively underperformed.

ChatGPT went onto tell me that I had good reason to suspect a shadowban.

I then used a popular shadowban checking website to see if it flagged me. It did. According to this website, I was indeed shadowbanned.

I checked my results against some other people I followed. Nobody else was flagged as being shadowbanned.

The nail in the coffin was when I looked up my account in incognito mode. My posts are entirely hidden. Again, I checked other accounts for similar results. Mine was the only one where all posts were hidden.

Compare to Jake’s, opened in the same browser under incognito mode. His posts are totally visible.

According to google and chatGPT, shadowban is the most likely explanation for this result.

At this point I have confirmed through multiple channels using multiple methods that I am shadowbanned on X. If this were a court of law and I were on the jury, I’d be confident beyond a reasonable doubt.

So, why was I shadowbanned? The most likely reason is that most of my posts were about my Substack articles. Elon Musk hates Substack. It’s confirmed that the algorithm throttles any post that mentions it. It wouldn’t be that surprising if accounts like mine, ones that are almost entirely dedicated to advertising for a Substack, are shadowbanned as policy.

The second most likely reason is that many of my posts took light-hearted jabs at Elon Musk and his content policy. As could be seen by his unhinged response to people who called him out for lying about videogames, Musk doesn’t really like people making fun of him, light-hearted or not. I wouldn’t be too surprised if he directed moderators to throttle accounts that criticize him.

Beyond my shadowban, the man-baby in charge has transformed Twitter into a softcore fight club. My “for you” feed is dominated by fights and porn, despite the fact that I do not follow or interact with anyone who posts fights or porn and have no desire to see either in my feed. But these videos drive engagement and that is apparently all that matters. I trained my old feed to contain almost nothing but tweets from academic twitter and the meaning-focused corner of the internet. Academic twitter barely seems to exist on X at this point. These days, I rarely see tweets that I actually care about in my feed.

My point? I may not have one. Let me make one up real quick.

The political right seems to have a penchant for putting rich men with giant egos on a kind of quasi-religious pedestal. Trump and Musk have much in common, and their appeal to right-wingers is largely the same. I used to think I had more in common with conservatives than progressives, at least in terms of politically relevant values. I naively believed that most conservatives cared about truth, at least compared to progressives. I saw progressives as being ruthlessly pragmatic in their willingness to bend the truth in order to fool the masses into adopting their policies. I still do see them that way, but conservatives are much, much worse.

The Trump-Elon administration, and the willingness of Republicans to justify (or naively believe) any number of lies in the name of owning the libs, taught me that I was merely a product of my time. My opinions were shaped through the Obama and Biden eras, when Republicans could still reasonably portray themselves as beleaguered underdogs. As soon as they seized the reins of power, the illusion shattered. Turns out that I was just naive, and that truth has no ideological home. Neither, increasingly, do I.

Anyways…

Here I am, shadowbanned in the kingdom of free speech, exiled for the terrible crimes of linking to outsides sources and making fun of the wrong billionaire. I’d love for X to be a digital agora, a place where good ideas came to the fore and truth had a fighting chance. Instead, it’s a panopticon run by a fragile overlord cosplaying as Prometheus while frantically refreshing his notifications.

Maybe that’s what we deserve—a platform that mirrors our politics: loud, insecure, addicted to conflict, and allergic to truth. If this is the future of public discourse, God help us. Or better yet—Substack help us.