Yes, my Twitter account was permanently suspended

Here's what happened.

:::: I am now on Post @atrupar! Please follow me there ::::

:::: Scroll to bottom of this article for updates ::::

Early Thursday evening, I started receiving messages that my Twitter account was suspended. I initially thought I was being trolled. But I picked up my phone to check it out and lo and behold, it’s true.

I have no idea what rules I purportedly broke. I haven’t heard anything from Twitter at all. I did publish a newsletter Wednesday morning featuring an article from Noah Berlatsky about Elon Musk’s reactionary populism. I also posted a tweet late last night noting that Musk seemed to violate Twitter’s policy against posting footage of someone without their consent in a tweet he posted yesterday. But it’s hard to imagine how either of those things violated Twitter’s policies.

I have spent more than five years painstakingly documenting major developments in US politics on Twitter with video, so losing that archive instantaneously and for no good reason is a bummer. And as an independent journalist running a newsletter business who relies on Twitter for new subscribers, being stripped of a huge part of my audience hurts.

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Anyway, I’m holding out hope that Twitter will reconsider this move, so anything you can do to help me get my account restored is appreciated. At the very least it would be nice if the company would try to explain what’s going on.

UPDATE: It occurred to me just after I published this that I did post a tweet yesterday noting that the ElonJet account that was suspended from Twitter was still active on Facebook, with a link to the Facebook page. Here it is:

As hard as it may be to interpret linking to a Facebook page that uses publicly available information to track a private jet as violating a “doxxing” policy, it appears that’s what Twitter did to justify my banning.

UPDATE 2: I’m back!

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

I want to thank everyone for all the support and kind words over the past day and some change. I was pretty bummed about getting suspended initially but quickly realized it’d be fine because I’m blessed to have an amazing online community. Seriously, I appreciate it a lot. Cheers

I’ll have more to say about all this in Monday’s edition of the newsletter.

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