What my brief Twitter suspension means for independent journalists

If it wasn’t for Twitter, I wouldn’t have been able to start my business. 

I made a name for myself putting together live video threads of major political events during the Trump years. I was a relatively obscure ThinkProgress (RIP) editor with roughly 5,000 Twitter followers in the fall of 2017 when I stumbled into the power of video clips by posting a couple Fox News bites that just happened to go viral. A year later, I had about 200,000 followers and was getting poached by Vox. Having an audience of that size is valuable professional currency, and I established myself as a prominent Trump critic who not only criticized the president but had video receipts.

By the fall of 2021, my Twitter account had gotten so big that I started considering the upside of going solo. Leaving a salaried job was a little scary, but I ultimately took the plunge and launched a Substack newsletter. I promoted it heavily to my Twitter followers, started converting them into free and paid subscribers, and made nice progress down the road of sustainability. I took for granted that Twitter would be there to help me make a living.

I was feeling pretty good about things until last Thursday: I am one of at least eight journalists/Elon Musk critics who was suddenly suspended from the platform on Thursday night. 

I initially had no clue what could’ve caused my suspension—perhaps, I thought, it had something to do with a newsletter I published the day before, criticizing Musk’s management of Twitter. Only later and with some help from reporters who were covering the suspensions did I discover that our infraction was sharing a link to a Facebook page that uses publicly available information to track Musk’s private jet. It seemed like absurdly thin gruel, but it was what it was.

This presented unique challenges for me. Unlike most of the journalists who were suspended, I’m not employed by a large media company like CNN or The New York Times. I’m entirely reader supported, and suddenly I was cut off from the 800,000 Twitter accounts who represent my pool of potential new subscribers. Staring at the notice of permanent suspension that was affixed to my read-only Twitter feed, I felt a pang of despondence.

I reflected on Twitter’s remarkably rapid deterioration. In the pre-Musk days, when Twitter was a publicly traded company, there were rules of the road that, for the most part, seemed to be enforced evenhandedly. If you were suspended for allegedly violating them, you could appeal. Now, I discovered that even Twitter’s link to “submit an appeal” was broken. I used to know dozens of people at the company who were happy to help me troubleshoot problems—my videos helped them attract more than four billion views to the platform, after all—but all had all either quit or been purged after Musk took over. The site’s new billionaire owner had not only stripped me of my livelihood, but seemingly left me with no recourse.

My despair didn’t last long, however. As news spread that I was among the reporters banned, I was flooded with messages of support and requests for TV interviews. New readers subscribed to the newsletter at an unprecedented rate as my name became the top trending topic in the U.S. both Thursday and Friday. Musk had turned me into something of a social media folk hero.

I knew this whole fiasco would actually be a net positive for me when Musk posted a poll, some three hours after my account ban was imposed, asking when our suspended accounts should be reinstated. Sure, he may have followed in Trump’s footsteps by rejecting the results when they came in on the side of unbanning us immediately, but you don’t post a poll like that if you’re really committed to permanent bans. After a second poll again turned out in our favor, our accounts were activated late Friday—on condition we delete the tweets that offended Musk.

I was back, but the message was sent. Musk’s absurd allegation was that we had violated the terms of service by endangering his family. But the real lesson seemed to be that prominent journalists he regards as enemies could be banned from the platform at any time. The tweet that got me in trouble didn’t even violate Twitter’s terms of service—Musk simply announced a policy change hours later and then retroactively punished me. I would now have to think twice when posting for fear saying the wrong thing could again result in me getting cut off from my audience again, especially if I dare criticize him.

It was a reminder that I was long overdue for investing some time into getting up and running on other platforms. Noam Bardin, founder of Post.News, shrewdly reached out to me Thursday evening to invite me to sign up. I did, and within days my account surged past 50,000 followers. That may be relatively small peanuts compared to my Twitter audience, but Post users are highly engaged and the site holds some promise. Even though I’m back on Twitter, I plan to continue using Post, and when the dust clears from my crazy few days I plan to get going on Mastodon too. I’m reassured that my Twitter followers will travel elsewhere and other independent journalists with engaged followings should be too.

Don’t get me wrong—Twitter’s rapid descent into a petty dictatorship is a bummer. Musk is now suggesting he may tap someone else to run the company, but as long as he owns it, independent journalists who rely on it to run a business need to make contingency plans. It’s time to start building audiences on new platforms. Musk may have caved in my case, but other journalists, such as Linette Lopez of Insider, remain banned for the offense of investigating Elon’s company (Twitter hasn’t bothered to even offer a reason for Lopez’s suspension). His extremely erratic behavior means that we can no longer count on Twitter to sustain us.

I’ve rolled with the punches throughout my professional life. I got my start as a blogger who never gave a thought to posting video clips. But when it became clear to me that there was a huge appetite for them, I embraced it, and it ended up making my career. If you would’ve told me a year ago that Elon Musk of all people would have done me a huge favor by suspending my Twitter account, that would’ve sounded pretty weird and I wouldn’t have believed it. Life is strange and things that initially seem negative can turn out for the best—especially when you’re an independent journalist targeted by thin-skinned billionaires.