Hilarity ensues: Elon Musk charges $8 a month for visibility on Twitter, but people find locking their account is somehow more effective
"Something fundamental is wrong" with Twitter's scam business model
Elon Musk is worried
When you start taxing users (on a free social media platform) $8 a month just to stay out of the ever-growing Shadow Realm of social media, you don’t want them suddenly finding out about a loophole. You especially don’t want those gullible suckers realizing they’re still being screwed despite paying for the Premium Official Luxury Extra-Verified Hyper-Engagement Viral Booster Super Checkmark.
How I discovered this before anyone
As far as I know, I am the first person who deliberately switched my Twitter account to “protected” mode (what people are calling “locked” because a locked icon appears next to the user’s name) in order to bypass Twitter’s biased algorithm and become visible to my followers. I’ve done it several times over the last 3 years. People asked me why, and I told them it boosts engagement like crazy; three or four times the activity on my feed, easily. They didn’t believe me, and then tried it themselves and found out it kinda worked. Perhaps that “rumor” I planted has been spreading ever since. I may be the person responsible for triggering this realization by all the biggest accounts.
‘Intellectual Dark Web’ founding member Eric Weinstein says he wants to “test the (mildly counterintuitive) claim that locked accounts are now being shown to more people by the current algorithm. Why do we have to do this? Argh.” Welcome to the club, Eric. It’s not a new thing. It was in place before Elon Musk bought Twitter.
The first time I realized this was accidental. I considered deleting my Twitter account, but I still wanted access to my bookmarked tweets for future reference, so I just locked it instead. It just so happened that even though protected mode forbid my followers from retweeting and hid me from strangers, I got a clear boost. This felt like a cruel trick of my followers, waiting until I hid my tweets to finally give me likes and replies. Normally that kind of engagement would start the “viral” process, but when I switched my account back to normal, the engagement stopped. This told me that it wasn’t a choice by my followers, but a deep bias in how Twitter distributes content.
The second time I locked my account was because I planned to test the system while avoiding any possible witch hunts during the pre-Musk manhunt of conservative influencers. It worked like a charm. You don’t go viral or gain followers (you have to manually approve requests to follow you) but at least your followers can see you for once. And hey, you don’t have to pay $8 a month.
Why social media uses speed bumps
I never particularly thought I was shadow banned, so my conclusion years ago was that they were screwing everybody and suppressing everything except those who were greenlit to have full visibility. In other words, every user was affected automatically, slowed down by what I call “speed bumps”. They hinder your growth unless you are whitelisted as one of their approved celebrity accounts.
TikTok and YouTube do the same thing.
It makes sense. Engagement is initially boosted to help users reach a small audience, just enough to hook them. Then they get serious, try harder, and want to amass a huge following by making good content. But speed bumps are put in place automatically, so that their views stagnate. They desperately chase the metrics and follow the trends of what seems to work for others, reaching out to friends, replying to more people, following more accounts in hopes of getting reciprocation, etc.
All of this looks great for the platform, but it messes with the user’s identity.
You see it all the time on TikTok. As somebody who gained a highly-engaged following of over 220,000 people in a relatively short span of time and millions of likes on my videos, I can guarantee you that TikTok absolutely messes with its rising stars. They gaslight you into doubting yourself, so that you’ll try harder. A good video is crippled by their algorithm randomly, and never gets more than 10% of the normal engagement. Your followers enjoy it if they see it! But people will also tell you in the comments, “I don’t see you on my For You page anymore.”
You just aren’t allowed to get eyeballs anymore. Reuploading it can sometimes bypass this speed bump and go viral, proving that it wasn’t the video’s fault. This inertia increases over time, so that you totally plateau and can barely get views no matter what you do.
Unless you are on the secret whitelist of approved celebrities, that is.
Twitter is in an awkward position of having a loophole. This exposes the lie of an unbiased algorithm, and also exposes that Elon Musk’s premium visibility tax was just slapped onto the broken system.
If you gained your followers any time before the 2016 suppression system was activated to stop Trump followers from taking over the platform and dwarfing the officially approved celebrities, you’re a lot like YouTube content creators before Google bought it. You lived in the golden age of real engagement.
The psyopticon has holes that need plugging
We all know by now that Big Tech and social media giants are controlled entities governed by the Deep State to wage psychological war on the public around the world, creating false movements, fake outrage, and control the narrative. We live in what I call the Psyopticon:
Elon Musk is part of that Deep State system, but in keeping with the Psyopticon he presents himself as a liberator, a meme-loving scoundrel, and a genius Tony Stark centrist inventor. He’s actually a scam artist, a fraud, and a grandson of a wealthy Canadian technocrat, charged with keeping the ruse going by giving people false hope. How aware he is of this, I don’t know.
Twitter’s self-locking loophole has shown what a fraud the engagement metrics are, and he can’t hide from it. He’s worried, but I’m laughing. I was never going to pay him for his bogus promise of increased engagement. That’s extortion, and the price of protection always goes up.