Twitter Censorship: A Personal Case Study Showing Irrefutable Proof…
…and why it needs to be fixed to resurrect our democracies
My career was in medical librarianship for a large Canadian provincial government public health agency, where I was head librarian for 25 years.
In 2009, after retiring, I started a Twitter account, where I often posted referenced health, environmental, and climate-related information. (I have co-authored two published books on climate change.)
By 2022, my account had grown to about 8,000 followers.
But during the pandemic the suspensions began.
I was suspended twice for posting peer-reviewed literature about Covid-19. Then I was permanently suspended on March 1, 2022 for no given reason.
So I started a new account from scratch, and to regain my Twitter friends and colleagues, I visited the old account – which is read-only – to search for people who had been following me there, and to invite them to re-follow me at my new account.
I happened to notice, on May 20, that one such climate friend who had happily re-followed me, was no longer following me!
Was she turned off by something I had tweeted?
I took my courage in my hands and tweeted to her asking if she had un-followed me — or had Twitter done it?
“No! I did not!” she replied.
So! After all the mysterious daily drops in my follower numbers — which have seemed to almost exactly match my new followers — Twitter was irrefutably caught red-handed stealing my followers for its own underhanded purposes.
For an insight into the sophisticated filters that Twitter uses to control news and speech, check out this interview from two years ago where these filters are briefly and expertly explained:
In view of this pervasive, disturbing censorship by a politically motivated corporation that so many people innocently trust, I was incredibly relieved for the future of our democracy when I saw that Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter and make it a free speech platform — a Public Square for open discussion.
But the knives in the shadows soon came out to stop him at any cost.
However: In opposition to those knives, his Twitter following has been growing in leaps and bounds by hundreds of thousands a day.
What does this mean?
It is a tumultuous time. Much honour has gone by the boards.
It seems that during this time we are in a fascinating and consequential war for the resurrection of democracy — and we have a leader the calibre of JFK.
Pray that he remains safe.
