Are you being shadow banned? How the Right-wing should use a mix of Gab.ai and Twitter

First, I know that many who read this may immediately say that there is no such thing as “Right-wing” so I would like to say that I’m just using it as a nomenclature for the people who represent an alternative to the Leftist thought culture.

For some time now Twitter has been arbitrarily suspending, deactivating and even manipulating Twitter accounts broadcasting diverse political opinions.

The video below also throws some light on the fact that Twitter “shadow bans” Twitter handles with contrarian views. The video has been released, if I’m not wrong, by @Project_Veritas

Although Twitter has denied (obviously) that such sort of banning exists, many Twitter users have been insinuating that something fishy is definitely going on. I constantly come across such interactions on my timeline:

“Shadow banning” means that a person is banned without his or her knowledge. The account is not suspended or terminated but some changes are made that prevents followers from receiving updates from the shadow banned account. People also find it difficult to retweet his or her updates. If he or she gets new followers, some followers are automatically unfollowed.

Even when we were unaware of the concept of “shadow banning” my wife and I — we both incline towards the Right — have been talking about our followers not increasing and fewer people retweeting even highly engaging tweets.

When a much-followed Twitter user like @mediacrooks retweeted one of my tweets, there used to be at least 60–80 retweets or “Likes”. These days there are hardly 1–5 retweets.

On an average I used to get 10–20 new followers every month. For a few months, although I get messages that people are following me, my followers count doesn’t increase. The same happens with my wife.

Although we have come across the news of “shadow banning” just a couple of days ago, for a few weeks we have been noticing this strange behaviour on Twitter.

Much is being written about how partial or impartial people managing Twitter is and only people inside Twitter must know what is going on, but a platform like Twitter has become such an important platform that if one is blocked or banned a suspended, it can totally render the targeted person without any means to convey his or her side of the story.

There is an alternative called Gab.ai, created in the wake of massive crackdown by Twitter on Right-wing groups in America. Ideally, the Indian Right-wing should have its own Twitter-like or Gab-like platform, but since, right now it is not available, I think Gab is a viable alternative in case something bad happens on Twitter.

Now, building a following can be an uphill task and many Twitter users have spent years building their followers. Followers are important because when you need to disseminate important information, you need followers, otherwise you will be talking in a vacuum.

Also, if all the people with anti-left opinion start joining Gab then only Leftists will be left on Twitter (in the sphere of political and ideological dialogue) and both the platforms will be reduced to ideological echo chambers, which wouldn’t be very productive.

So, my suggestion is, create an alternative presence on Gab. Encourage your followers to join Gab and start following you. If you have enough time, start cross posting on Gab. This will make your content available on Gab too.

Obviously we have posted lots of content on Twitter. For example, there is a cornucopia of historical wealth posted by @TrueIndology. All this awesome wisdom shouldn’t be left at the mercy of Twitter.

For those accounts that have posted lots of valuable information on Twitter, they should download their archive and save it somewhere locally. Then many people should urge the developers of Gab to provide a feature that would allow to import older Twitter updates into Gab.

The basic point should be, get your content over to Gab, build a following and get into a habit of cross posting. This way, if Twitter ever decides to arbitrarily suspend or block your account, you will have an alternative platform with all your updates intact.