(re) Follow me on the twitter

I HAVE MOVED MY TWEETERY TO A NEW ACCOUNT:

*** CLICK HERE TO (RE)FOLLOW ME: Ferns__ ***.

I’m following back and everything so come and clickety-click.

Note: Just to confuse you, yes, my twitter account name IS THE SAME AS BEFORE, but it IS a new account and you STILL have to re-follow me.
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Background story and bitchery: If you’ve been reading this blog (or other sex bloggers) over the past few months, you’ll know about the pornocalypse which is about social media platforms stifling (or outright banning) the voices of adult content creators (in case you haven’t noticed, that’s me!).

My twitter account, which I have had since 2010(!), had been shadowbanned for months. I posted that story about shadowbanning in October. I was shadowbanned well before I posted it (for how long exactly, I don’t know: They don’t tell you when or why). And I have been shadowbanned ever since.

When you are shadowbanned, you can still tweet, but only people who already follow you can see your tweets, which means that whatever you say is bouncing around a closed group. Most users who were shadowbanned if they did something ‘bad’ (like *gasp* show a nipple or something) had the ban lifted after a week or so, and here I was months and months later and still banned. I had not done anything to break any rules as far as I was aware, and I post nothing explicit, so there was nothing to ‘fix’ to get un-shadowbanned, and still it persisted.

I tried every strategy that had ever been thought of or mentioned anywhere to get around whatever algorithm I had been caught up in without result.

I took to raising it with twitter support every few days (I raised it previously, but now I was just popping into their support-bot every couple of days to report some version of the same thing). Then the support-bot started pretending not to understand what I was saying (I assume they identified me as a spammer for bothering them too much and were no longer accepting my reports).

At that point I decided I had to abandon my account and start over to get out from under the shadowban *dramatic music*.

Anyone who has had a social media account for many years and who has some emotional investment in it knows how big a deal that is (those who haven’t are probably thinking ‘OMG shut up already!’ :P). To put it in perspective, I had posted over 86,000 tweets, ‘liked’ over 11,000 pieces of content from others, and had over 1,500 followers. So starting again from scratch means abandoning all of that. First world problem, absolutely. Still feels like ‘a thing’. Relationships with and on social media carry weight for those who invest in them.

Luckily, twitter allows you to re-use the same account name immediately after you change the original so I did NOT have to update links all over the internet (the link is also in my books, including hard copies: Eek!). So my NEW twitter nickname is the same as before, but it’s still a completely different account (I know: confusing).

Bottom line: If you were following me before, you have to re-follow me on my new account.

So, come and (re)follow me: Ferns__ (double underscore).
I’m following everyone back right now, so come get some of that sweet sweet follow back action.