Séamas O’Reilly: I criticised ‘free speech absolutist’ Elon Musk’s X platform. My account was suspended

When one gets banned by a social media platform, it’s often hard to know why.

At least, I presume this is a universal reaction, since it’s never happened to me in fourteen years of tweeting.

That was until this past weekend, when my X account was suspended, about five hours after I shared my last column for this very paper.

Was it something I said?

The notification claimed I’d been suspended for “violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam”. I began thinking back over my last few tweets.

I’d shared a promotion for The Fence, a satirical magazine I co-edit in London. I’d posted a prank letter I’d sent to the FAI sixteen years ago, putting myself forward for the Irish manager’s job.

Shortly before that, I’d shared that column I mentioned earlier, one which funnily enough concerned online spam and platform manipulation, making specific reference to the fact that Twitter/X could be considered complicit in the deluge of bots and scams on their platform since they materially benefit from their activities and show little to no interest in regulating them.

It was no use. The more I examined my timeline, the less anything conclusive jumped out at me.

I dug deeper. Just after I shared that column, I’d also shared a photo of Spirit Level by Richy Craven, a book I’d been sent which arrived with some ghost-patterned socks, a ghost sticker and a little ghost pin – a charming promo package I felt was in need of a wider audience, but was it too spooky?

The notification claimed I’d been suspended for “violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam”.

I’d shared a terrible job interview experience someone had posted – was this considered too trite?

The only other thing that came to mind – and I’m really reaching here – was right back to that aforementioned article about scams.

In that piece, you may recall, I wrote “the future’s true footprint is in the deadening grind of bots now littering every single layer of the internet, talking to us, talking to each other, on the off chance they might one day, somehow, trick somebody, anybody, into giving them a few quid”.

Five minutes since I’d posted that article on Twitter, 75% of the replies I’d received had themselves been spam bots trying to sell fake shite to my followers.

I’d made specific reference to the fact that X receives a monthly income from many of those rapacious spam bots, through the platform’s blue checkmark subscription system, and that X’s status as a “vastly indebted and unprofitable platform” might “greatly disincentivise his company taking proactive measures to weed them out”.

I illustrated this in that article by mentioning that the first reply I got to a previous article about the future of the Northern Irish executive, had somehow been a bot advertising graphic pornography.

That this assertion was immediately, indeed comically, re-confirmed by five more bots selling fake tech support and porn under the article making that statement, seemed too ridiculous not to mention.

But I can’t quite see how any of the above would turn heads at a company headed by Elon Musk, a man so committed to the open exchange of ideas that he calls himself a “free speech absolutist”, and famously said “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter because that is what free speech means.” 

A man so vehement in his belief that censorship is wrong – and wrong in all cases – that he last month offered to pay the legal costs of Irish hate groups so that they could say whatever they feel without censure.

A man who has even, in a rare reversal of that well-worn cliché, put his mouth where his money is, by using his own personal account to endorse statements advocating racism and anti-semitism, and even gone so far as to tell advertisers who didn’t like this that they “can go f*ck themselves”.

Would such a company really be offended by some ghost socks? A fake job application to be the manager of the Irish football team?

A thousand-word article which laid bare the fact that their company has been directly and materially benefitting from running Twitter into the ground, overseeing levels of manipulation and spam which have rendered its timeline an unnavigable, predatory mire?

Perhaps the staff who would once have been available to sort this out were among the 80% Musk sacked when he took over but, at time of writing, the account is still suspended with no explanation as to what caused it in the first place.

For the avoidance of all doubt, I do not consider the loss of this account an important and sobering global news event. Personally, I’m quite annoyed. Professionally, I’m alarmed.

This is after all, the platform through which I’ve grown a career from scratch to nearly a hundred thousand followers, made friendships, gotten work – and written whole books – that I never could have done, had I been forced to rely on connections I’ve never had, or unpaid internships I could never afford.

“Perhaps the staff who would once have been available to sort this out were among the 80% Musk sacked when he took over.”

Mostly, I’m just bewildered to find myself inserted, Flann O’Brien style, into the very story of social media dysfunction I was telling.

Immediately after I got the suspension notification, I clicked the little Appeal link on the ban notification, mildly gratified that after a decade and a half of using Twitter I had a new button to push, and one that didn’t seem to be just yet one more way of separating me from my cash.

I have heard nothing back and nor, at time of writing, have any of the news organisations currently asking whether an Irish-headquartered tech behemoth has really deleted the account of an Irish journalist for critiquing their operations in an Irish newspaper.

The truth couldn’t be that mundane, surely? So cack-handedly obvious, so stultifyingly inane? I sincerely hope not.

I ended my last article by saying that the future we live in wasn’t just terrifying, but boring.

I am running out of reasons to think otherwise but, for the first time in my adult life, I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong.