The Price of Integrity: What's Yours Worth?
To what extent are you prepared to stifle your own voice until it becomes unrecognizable as your own?
Welp, back again with another gripe. I promise this is not what I plan to make this entire Substack about because let’s be real, no one likes someone who complains without also offering solutions to the issue they’re complaining about.
That being said, I have no resolution to the issues I’m about to address. Because I have been vocal in my inquiries and critiques, I (and countless others) have essentially been memory-holed on the platform formerly known as Twitter, 𝕏. This goes beyond just complaining about the product we buy every month, this is borderline theft.
So, let’s get into it.
Since you’re here and reading this, I assume you have probably seen some of my complaints about how the Twitter 2.0 platform is being run and the changes that were made affecting certain accounts without any response from customer support on the platform to address the issues many are having.
I started to notice a dramatic drop in views on my posts and engagement sometime around the summer of 2023. Up until that point, it’s not something I ever paid much attention to because my following was sufficient enough that I knew without checking that my posts were circulating through the algorithm and millions of people came across what I was saying or sharing with every post.
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment this change occurred where my reach effectively fell off a cliff into a full-on nose dive. You can no longer access your analytics beyond six months-so unless you were downloading your data every month or so, you’re screwed on comparing data.
First, if I’m not mistaken, ad revenue was offered up to those who hit a 5 million engagement threshold in each 28-day period. This was later reduced to I believe 3M or 1M…not sure, but much lower and more attainable numbers. Next came the ability for everyone to see the amount of views each post had. Between the new goal set by those who signed up for monetization and were receiving ad revenue and the view count on posts, ensuring you hit this threshold to receive any payout at all became essential. The metrics became the new driver for those seeking to make a buck while posting content on the platform.
At the time, this was a new and exciting opportunity to possibly make a little “tip money” off content you were already posting. Also at this time, I was getting millions and millions of impressions every 28 days without needing to check. This seemed like a no-brainer to sign up for. Whatever payout I would receive was certainly more than doing it all for free, so why not?
This caused many interesting fractures to occur on the platform. Some accounts decided they wanted that ad revenue and were going to begin testing what content was the most valuable. This meant posting things that they hadn’t before. Accounts that gained their following from posting certain “genres” for lack of a better term, began to post stolen memes, videos, and other content that was not reflective of what their audience was familiar with up until this point on their account. Most of these followers to said accounts originally followed because they enjoyed the content the account holder provided. Now, the accounts they once loved are unrecognizable and no longer publish the same content pre-ad revenue days.
For some, this was incredibly profitable. Posts that were pure entertainment and added nothing of value to public discourse were boosted in the algorithm. Posts that did not evoke thought or start discussions where we could all add our thoughts, expertise, experience, or opinion were all their accounts were now comprised of. (Think Facebook).
Which brings up a good point, actually. For me, I use Instagram to publish more artistic images and videos of my life, my family, and my experiences. I keep it private because it highlights a side of my life that is not for the general public to consume. Same with Facebook, which I rarely use. I have it to where only people I have interacted with in real life, or those I have worked with closely in the past have access to my posts because, again, I use it to highlight my children and my private life. I don’t use either of these platforms to start or engage in thought-provoking conversations or debates. They say religion and politics are the two topics you don’t bring up at the Thanksgiving table, ie: topics that are off-limits if you want to keep friends and family around.
I compartmentalize these different social media sites and for me, Twitter/𝕏 was always where I would go to not only get the latest news but also to engage with other people on topics that were important to me, and more importantly to learn and expand my knowledge on any given subject.
Twitter/𝕏 was once a digital public square where free thought, free speech, and free expression were all available to those who used the platform. This is no longer the case.
I think a lot of 𝕏 users were excited when Elon bought the platform with all these novel ideas of how it could be utilized to enhance public discourse and free-flowing information that did not come from the Mockingbird mainstream media. Many see Elon as the savior of free speech, which was always laughable, but there was hope that he would do something about the rampant censorship dished out from the Twitter 1.0 Trust & Safety department which had been permanently suspending accounts that didn’t align with their own personal political views or that personally offended them for XYZ reasons. Poof. Done. No recourse. Usually, no reason was given for your temporary or permanent suspension from the platform, and forget about appealing their decisions to ban you or ever reaching a human on the platform to get answers for receiving the ban hammer.
What actually happened after Elon bought the platform for $44 billion was he realized how many issues would need to be addressed to make the platform a “free speech” platform that wasn’t curated by petty people who worked for the company. At least this is what was sold to the public. Elon swiftly laid off roughly 80% of Trust & Safety employees and replaced them with AI/bots who now would monitor the algorithm.
This left absolutely no humans available to respond to any issues via customer support. Auto-responses to any and all questions via emails in the “Help Center” on the platform are now all you would receive if you had questions or concerns about your account, or if you were locked out or suspended from your account without being provided an explanation of the offenses that got you booted.
Now, in an attempt to recover some of that $44 billion Elon invested into the platform he offered a “Premium” service for $8/mo that claimed to provide the user with boosted engagement, increased character limits on individual posts, the ability to edit posts, and now you could post videos that were up to 10 minutes long, rather than the 2.30min available to basic users. Oh, and you would receive the once-coveted blue checkmark that only important people had on their profiles with Twitter 1.0.
Then came the “tier system” which I covered here:
You could pay twice as much at $16 to receive no additional features that Premium didn’t already offer and you also would still not have any access whatsoever to a human being in the customer service department. Remember, with each tier level this was supposed to provide the user with better customer service. It was a ruse. Many of us thought that as you moved up the tier system you would see boosted engagement as well. Those under this tier were said by 𝕏 to have prioritized customer service support and posts and replies by accounts under Premium+ would be seen at a greater rate. The user’s replies under this tier were promised to be at the top of the comments under any given post, so, amplified or boosted.
None of this was true. I know because I’ve done it all.
In addition to trying Premium and then Premium+ and not seeing any of the benefits that these products were sold to the public as providing, I decided as more or less a last-ditch effort to reach a human at 𝕏 Support to apply for an affiliate program under an organization. “Full Access” Verified Organizations are required to pay $1,000/mo plus $50 per affiliate to 𝕏. This also meant that rather than paying the $16 for Premium+ I would in addition be paying monthly to be an affiliate and receive a badge representing an organization next to my name. At this point, I’m paying close to $100 to receive prioritized support and boosted visibility in the algorithm.
None of this ever transpired either.
Let’s take a gander at some of the promised features as an affiliate and/or and organization on 𝕏.
Among some of the lies that are laid out on the Verified Organizations portion of the 𝕏 Help Center include:
“Organic posts by your organization and its affiliates will be seen by more people, without the need for advertising.”
Also there’s this gem: “Verified Organizations have access to Premium Support. Organizations experiencing issues, including with onboarding, removing or adding affiliates, billing, or issues with impersonation of your accounts, can contact Premium Support and we will ensure you timely support and escalations.”
An outright LIE. What Orgs received is the same access to “Premium Support” as those at the Premium+ level which consisted of a DM system on the Premium+ 𝕏 account that would post automated, canned responses to any inquiries you may have.
Another fun fallacy they declare as a feature of the affiliate and organization programs is that of “Elevated post, DM, and media upload limits.”
“Verified Organizations and their affiliates have significantly elevated post, DM, and media upload rate limits. Verified Organizations subscribers can use this to provide seamless customer support, live-post events, or run auto-response campaigns.”
Your rate limit does not increase beyond the $8 Premium tier. It didn’t increase under the Premium+ tier nor as an affiliate. You don’t have any longer media upload rate limit either, and to say your posts are elevated is again, a blatant lie.
I have seen zero benefits beyond the $8 Premium level.
One of my favorite responses received by this automated system is (and I’m paraphrasing here), “We don’t deal with viewership or engagement issues, only in subscription services.”
This is one of the most insulting auto-responses you may receive when trying to get assistance on an account you’re paying close to $100/mo for service and upgraded features for.
“Just write better posts, bruh.”
This is something that for those of us who have built our following BECAUSE of the content we post to be rude and honestly, absurd. That’s how we got to where we are, because people enjoy what we share, not because we curate crap posts. Beyond insulting.
So, if you have any questions about the benefits laid out on the website, too bad. Basically, F-U. There’s no “ticket” you can file on the Help Center that falls under anything having to do with labels or flags that have been applied to your account by the algorithm or from users weaponizing the reporting system by mass blocking posts or your account in bad faith because you got under someone’s skin - or in my case, entire communities of people.
It was important for me to lay all of this out first because there are accounts that have done very well under these tiers. These accounts have streamlined their posts/content to milquetoast bread and circuses that overwhelm your timeline. These accounts are rewarded for their lack of having anything whatsoever to add to the platform, and their content is not original - meaning they just snag whatever they want from someone who created the image/video/post and published it as their own, with no credit given to the creator. They’re rewarded on 𝕏 for the artificial, saccharine sweet posts to paint the world in sunshine and flowers. I can almost hear the little bluebirds singing much like any given scene from Snow White.
Now, while I understand the need to have positive, motivational content to remind us all that though we’re surrounded by doom and gloom with no clear end in sight, the entire world has not entirely gone to shit. Puppies and kittens still exist with new litters being born every minute, tulips and daffodils are blooming, waterfalls still flow, etc., etc., etc.
We get it. And it’s good to have a reminder of this, but the reality is we’re in dire straights as a society at the moment. From the reanimated corpse we call the president being rolled out to give us his weekly gaffe session and embarrass us all on the world-stage, to wars, wars, and rumors of wars, to the sexualization of minor children, to the economy, I could literally go on and on and on, there are important things that require discussion and demand attention.
There are things currently happening in the world that deserve to be discussed in a digital public square where we can all learn from one another. That’s the only way that we as a species grow. Knowledge. Learning. Talking to one another. Disagreeing.
Instead, this is all being siloed and compartmentalized on 𝕏, buried deep in the algorithm. This started to really go into overdrive when Linda Yaccarino began as Twitter’s new CEO on June 5th, 2023. Without going down a bottomless rabbit hole in this piece, what is important to know is that Yaccarino is the Chairman of the World Economic Forum's Taskforce on the Future of Work, and the Chair of the Advertising Council's Board of Directors. Feel free to look into that further.
This is important to mention though because if you’re familiar with the WEF and its goals in shaping the future of humanity, there’s a weighted interest in control. It only makes sense that the rampant censorship on 𝕏 increased exponentially once she came on board. There are coincidences, then there is the lowest common denominator. Occam’s razor, even.
Make of it what you will, but it was June of 2023 when all of a sudden there was an influx of posts on 𝕏 of accounts complaining of their reach on the platform and accounts being restricted. Viewership on each of their posts was cut down to a fraction of what they received in prior months and years. In addition to visibility and reach issues, accounts were now mentioning how they could not get any customer service or reach anyone via the Help Center or Premium+ customer service channels.
Since experiencing similar issues on my own account, and witnessing the same happening to hundreds of other accounts, I began to inquire about what I had done wrong to receive the intense suppression of my account.
Some accounts realized certain keywords used in posts would “deboost” the post and the account that posted it. This makes sense to me. The algorithm can easily flag certain words and then push these posts to the bottom of the barrel. AGAIN, the algorithm is applying these to posts and accounts, not a human, and no human reviews the reports coming in. The keywords, however, were everything from “groomer,” “ugly” and “trans”, that in 2024 are being considered “hate speech” to words like “police” and even “amen”. They are much more ridiculous than these examples, but to save time I’ll just ask that you use your imagination. Not only would these terms deboost the post and the account, but if they popped up on any account that was under the monetization program, the post would immediately not be eligible for ads to run in the comments - demonetized. Too many of these meant the entire account was now no longer to be part of the monetization program.
Ironically enough, as I write this “Elon Musk’s X” is trending on the platform. It’s full of complaints and accusations of the platform running bot farms to increase ad revenue and fake traffic and engagement.
Most recently, in my pursuit of trying to reach help for the suppression on my own account, I ran into a few people who later held a Space on the platform and offered the solution to being censored on 𝕏. It went a little something like this:
“What you need to do is go back through the last several months of posts on your account and delete all critiques of 𝕏 and/or Elon. This would include inquiries into what’s happening on your account or discussions around censorship, view count, or suppression on the platform. Delete all of those. You will want to instead post positively about 𝕏, SpaceX, Tesla, and Elon. Give it a few days after doing this and review your engagement. You should see a small boost after 4 days, more after 7, and by 28 you should be leveled out to an even playing field.”
This sentiment was echoed by dozens of accounts within the Space. While this makes sense, obviously 𝕏 isn’t going to be happy about you complaining about the lack of service, viewership on your posts, or continued deboosting of your account, but what’s the alternative?? Lying through your teeth about how amazing the platform is? Lying about how much your account has grown since subscribing to a tier system that doesn’t provide the services it claims to? Not warning others of the bait-and-switch so many of us fell for?
Sure, you can do that. Maybe your now-suppressed account will magically be seen in the algorithm again and your account will begin to skyrocket in engagement, views, and ad revenue. You can play the game, and possibly join the top players who are making tens of thousands of dollars a month from ad revenue due each payout session and then quit your day job. Some have. You can continue to post stolen content without giving the creators credit. You can make posts that equate to littering trash all over everyone’s timeline and depleting users’ experience on the platform. You can reduce the public discourse to pictures of baby ducklings and regurgitated memes from the 2015 presidential election that have been saved and reposted so many times over the years that their pixelation is wrecked leaving them blurred almost beyond recognition.
You can totally do that.
You will, however, do so at a high cost. You will pay with your integrity.
Understand, this is not and never was just a complaint-fest because I’m being singled out. Though my account is wildly suppressed, this is about the platform itself not living up to the promises made in its paid subscription service. This is about the manipulation of the algorithm to boost absolute trash posts in front of millions of eyes while important conversations are buried so deep in the algorithm that only a handful of people ever see the posts to engage in conversations about things that matter.
They’ve created a hellscape of endless dopamine hits that provide no value to society under the guise of reducing “hateful content” from being seen. No longer are extensive threads that cover a topic and provide insight to the user receiving eyes and traction on the platform. The shorter the better when it comes to individual posts.
They’ve snuffed out the voice of any inquiring minds who question what’s happening in the world in pursuit of “healthy behavior online”. How healthy are these posts for society when no one is talking to each other? No one is discussing the world around us and our personal experiences living through it. No one is comparing notes or asking each other questions in order to have a better understanding. It’s limiting our growth as a society and dumbing everyone down to a level where the only important thing is driving the need for more and more dopamine hits while burying our heads in the sand.
It’s honestly really pathetic that this is what they’ve decided to sell to the public as a product, though. It seems it was always the goal to compartmentalize discussion and silo those who dared to bring up topics seen as taboo or controversial.
Controlling public discourse and steering conversations by way of suppressing thought while boosting the mundane and snooze-worthy content is outright social engineering.
This was always what social media was really about. That, and data collection of course, which is now the most valuable commodity on earth. Using our data to train AI I believe to have always been the goal of Musk, with WEF foot soldiers co-opting his purchase of Twitter for their own piece of the pie.
In the meantime, I’ve seen amazing accounts completely sell out for ad revenue and internet “clout”. Several accounts I once enjoyed reading and interacting with have decided this was far more important than having a voice on the platform. I don’t even knock someone who wants to advance in the game on the platform, which is exactly what it is, a game. The game, however, constantly moves the goalposts and changes the rules. Usually without anyone ever noticing unless you’re going over their TOS once or twice a day.
There is no transparency as to what the rules of the game are, and there’s no way to receive any hints or the key to the map, (answers), via customer support even though some may pay for that feature, as outlined in the terms of the subscription and/or contract agreement under different tiers on the platform.
Those of us who understand the game (in its current state) enough to see how it’s being played and what you must do to advance in the game and among other “players” see these accounts, the sellouts, the lazy, the talentless being rewarded for littering the timeline with stolen content. Any respect any of us once had for them is now gone. They have exchanged their credit in the communities they once built their following on for ad revenue and favoritism in the algorithm.
For me, and my standing on the platform, I refuse to not speak my mind, share my thoughts on any given topic, or ask questions when the answers have been pursued (and paid a pretty penny to receive a response) but have proven to be unattainable because the platform’s customer service is run by AI. If that means only 100 people see what I say, so be it. At least my posts will be of my own opinions and not disingenuous. I refuse to do a 180° on my audience and lie to them.
My integrity is not for sale.
Yours shouldn’t be either.
Totally agree with you. This myth of the Town Square, where all can be heard, all can share, won’t happen with X. The very fact that people who are doing well in this new process have so sanitized their content, proves your point about integrity. You Haley, you want to make a difference, and if you can’t be “you” then why try and be someone else. It’s simple selling of the soul, and that is something that I respect about you, because you stay true to your values.
Yeah. He could easily get sued over this.