The Death of Twitter

Back in May 2007 I discovered a social media platform that would transform how people would share and consume information. After dabbling with MySpace, and not being particularly impressed, I found Twitter to be refreshing and innovative.

Microblogging, as it was called, encouraged people to be brief with their thoughts. 140 characters was all your were allowed. And back in those days, images and videos were not part of the platform.

I quickly built my following to over 5000 people and soon received a solicitation to write a book on the subject.

Twitter Power was released on in Spring of 2009 and became what may have been the top-selling book on how to use Twitter for business.

The following year, I updated the book with volume 2. And in 2014, Dave Taylor assisted me in bringing the work current to the era. In that time my following grew to over 800,000 people.

Many changes took place at Twitter over the years, but the most unfortunate was the outright censorship that took place when Donald Trump tossed his hat in the ring to run for President of the United States.

I, along with many others, saw my visibility and engagement drop like a rock. Twitter\’s political hacks began operating as though they worked for the Democrat party, silencing the voices of those they disagreed with in a manner that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud.

Those of us who saw what was taking place at the time spoke up, but the mainstream narrative would simply not acknowledge what we knew was happening before our eyes. Twitter became virtually worthless to me as a communications tool due to this censorship. Twitter had lost its power.

The truth about Twitter came out in 2023 when Elon Musk purchased the flailing site from the shareholders. The Twitter Files revealed that not only were employees taking action to silence and shadow-ban those who were exercising their right to free speech, but they were taking instruction from leading operatives in the Democrat party to do so. And as suspected, we now know that other social sites such as Facebook were following the same orders. Fascism, anyone?

The truth about what took place is undeniable and no longer up for dispute. Twitter, their executives and their employees acted in coordination with the Democrat party and mainstream media to control a narrative that they insisted was right. There\’s a word for this. It\’s called \”evil\”.

Elon Musk has taken great steps to restore Twitter to be the free-speech platform where everyone has a voice that it once was before Jack Dorsey sold out to political interests.

I was originally verified on Twitter in the very first round of verifications well over a decade ago. But like everyone else, my legacy blue checkmark was removed and I was required to pay for Twitter Blue in order to be verified.

I\’ve no problem with this and I believe Musk is brilliant for charging people $8/month to be verified and use the service. It eliminates a good number of bots from the system and encourages us to act like real humans.

However, I have been paying for Blue for more than six months, and no matter how many times I write support, my account remains stuck in verification limbo. I\’ve also written to ask why my account has been throttled, but all I receive are cut and paste replies from Twitter.

I know the site is no longer called Twitter. It\’s now called \”X\”.

Regardless, the same problems remain. There\’s nothing I\’ve been able to do to get the attention of someone with half a brain on the support team to look at my account and deal with the problem.

This has appeared on my account for six months now.

So I don\’t spend much time on Twitter now. I did set up a second account @RealJoelComm and paid to verify it. But it\’s unfortunate that I\’ve been unable to reach the over 600,000 accounts that chose to follow me in the past.

Will @joelcomm ever be useful again or am I forever stuck in limbo? Will Elon Musk or anyone with authority ever care that I pay monthly and am not receiving what I am paying for? Beats me. It\’s worth the monthly fee just to see how long this goes on for. Perhaps it will make a newsworthy story for a Musk-hater at a media publication to write about it. Probably not.

Want to follow me now? I do tweet from time-to-time on @RealJoelComm.

Yes, Twitter as we knew it is dead. And thankfully, the partisan Stalin-like employees are mostly gone. Elon Musk is turning X into a vibrant community-oriented platform that is unafraid to have all points of view expressed.

Will X ever be alive for me again? Only time will tell.  Perhaps you can share this article with Elon Musk and somehow something will change.

Or not. Either way, I\’ve found that I am much happier when I don\’t use social media. (I\’ve not used Facebook for 2 1/2 years, though I reserve the right to change what I do there in the future).

Twitter is dead. Long live X, as long as X stands for free speech.