Twitter – The Rules and Self Defence
UPDATE Oct 2023
So, loads of changes. The stuff below this is pretty out of date (I will review later), here are the current bullet points :-
FIRST : Join my Community I set up for us in adult.
It’s essentially private – only members can post or read. FREE to join. I just check your TL to make sure real.
The BIG ONE !!! THIS is why your engagement is down!!!
Twitter is now shadowbanning where it THINKS you MIGHT post nudes or other adult content.
https://www.xbiz.com/news/277401/x-now-shadowbanning-users-for-potential-sexual-content
This is DELIBERATELY DESIGNED to reduce our reach and enagement. Not fair? They don’t care. They are trying to make money, and TBH, it was probably this or outright banning. They are applying this even to people who already mark as NSFW
Keep your Profile and Banner Safe For Work
Even lingerie is a rule breach that can get your account killed.
Mark your account NSFW
Accidentally posting mature content without tagging, gets your account closed.
Engagement is DOWN, by Order of the Peaky Elon
Because Elon has made it harder for our stuff to be seen. In both feeds :-
For You.
Most people haven’t noticed that For You has settings in notifications, that by default, have a “quality” filter selected. One important effect of having that filter selected is that is massively reduces the amount of SW, adult and NSFW content that appears in For You.
Yep, we are being algo’d into invisibility.
In effect, we are much less visible to most users. Very few people will turn off a filter marked “quality”.
Following
Is where all our posts do show up.
But no one looks there much. Because it’s basically everything posted by all the people you follow, and so, often too much of a fire hose.
Notifications bell
If people tick the bell on your profile, they should get all your tweets, but I’m not sure whether this means they get into their For You feed.
Overall Impact
We can get our view of Twitter back, and see all our industry peers, but the general population will not see us as much, and will need to take action to do so. Trouble is, people are lazy.
Existing Followers : Will see many fewer of your posts. You’ll need to keep pushing them to hit the notifications bell on your profile.
Strangers : Will see many fewer of your posts. Fans will be much harder to come by.
END OF UPDATE
FROM HERE ON IS OLD – some may work, some may be broken as Twitter API also changed.
So Elon has taken over. What’s happening? No fucking clue. But for now, everything below still seems valid, with the ADDITIONAL observation that the moderation system seems bust – the AI is dumb and the people who (I guess) spotted the dumb shit, have gone. So flocks of birds are objectionable…
UPDATE May 2023 : New CEO. The new CEO has a background in mainstream advertising. Her one job is “revenue, revenue, revenue”. A LOT of companies avoided Twitter BEFORE Elon partly because of Twitter’s relaxed approach to adult. Then a bunch left after he took over. Linda’s job is “get back the ones who left, and bring on board the ones who never came”. A crackdown on adult, esp SW is something we should prepare for. Google Nostr and join, it’s our life raft (we can take our fans there…).
Yes, you can use Twitter for adult, for now, but know the rules. Nutshell – keep your Profile to be Church Friendly, even if your posts are porn central..
What HASN’T happened?
Twitter has not banned NSFW content.
NSFW is fine, so long as it’s marked as Sensitive and it’s not spammy.
What WILL happen?
No one knows. But, Twitter has to deal with American laws and American politics, and NO ONE in US politics is going to fight for porn and SW, except by accident (because they want something else, and we come with).
Rather than worry about what they might do, let’s just say that they – Twitter – get away with “sorry, we’ll put more into moderation services” and at our end, “Twitter enforces it’s rules more tightly”, and have a personal defence plan.
ACTION THIS DAY!
- Profile pic and Header Banner : Put your clothes on. And for this purpose, lingerie aren’t considered clothes! Note that if your round profile pic hides rudeness in the Header, Twitter sees the rudeness. Also note, this IS something Twitter has tightened up on (it used to only care about genitals, now nude, partially nude and even, it seems, tits/bum, even if covered by lingerie, are considered “adult”).
- URLS in Profile pic or Header Banner : Not to any adult or SW site. Put them in your bio and/or pinned tweet.
- Sensitive Media Flag On? : Check it. One person noticed that when they changed their password, that flag was removed! At time of writing, More, Settings, Privacy and Safety, Your Tweets, Tick the box. (There is also a Remove Location information from your tweets here, which is useful for YOUR safety).
- Automatic Tweets from Platforms : Turn them off, can be considered spammy. All those new uploads, sales, hotlists, whatever, just dump them. YOU post when YOU decide to.
- RT engagement groups, esp if RTing Sensitive Media : Leave them. Twitter doesn’t like accounts that interact too much with sensitive media, and frankly, doesn’t like accounts that basically just RT a lot anyway. It wants YOUR ORIGINAL TWEETS.
- DO NOT create a backup account : Twitter don’t like people trying to circumvent their rules. Save your followers, create a new account under a new name later, and run it according to Twitters rules. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion
- SUGGESTION : DO NOT enable your tip jar. I am not sure that we can’t take tips, but it’s a fair bet that even if we can, that will end on the day Twitter notice adult stuff being tipped, and the next day the T&C will be clarified – which no one will notice – and the day after that accounts will start to get closed.
- SUGGESTION : DO NOT use the LIVE feature. I’m not sure this is banned, but have seen reliable comment to that effect. I think it was Periscope, and they certainly banned adult.
Now, the above might sound extreme, but it basically about moderation – Twitter wants to see TL’s that seem to be real. So, for example, a few autos in the mix with plenty of “real” tweets, no problem. But too many = problem. What is too many? Twitter aren’t telling.
Consider – as a “controlling what’s out there”, deleting old tweets en mass. I mean, is it of any business value to have your tweets from 3 years ago? Esp since Twitter keep changing their T&C and an old tweet that surfaces could get you thrown in Twitter jail, or banned. After my jailing, I used TweetDelete.net to purge all my old tweets then set up an automated purge, so now, you’ll see nothing much older than 3 months. They charge, but tiny.
Note – the free delete systems all seemed to be limited to 3200 tweets, which is why I paid.
SAVE YOUR FOLLOWERS
https://www.vicinitas.io/free-tools/download-twitter-followers a free tool that saves all your Followers to an Excel sheet.
It’s free up to 5000 followers (so, me sorted, and yes, it worked) but they charge if you have more. But if you have more, it’s worth paying. At time of writing, $5 for 20,000 followers, up to $100 for 1 MILLION. I’d be grabbing a monthly update for sure.
One person said “but I have 23K followers, I can’t add them all back by hand”. No, you can’t. But really, you skim them and add back the 2000 that you recognise. If Twitter makes you proper money, so you have a business case, you hire a remote worker in a cheap country to add them for you all day long at a few cents per person.
ALSO https://www.exportdata.io/ has a more sophisticated service (e.g. includes grabbing the people YOU follow, but is charged. Not much, I just paid $3.49 for a followers and following download)
GRAB YOUR ARCHIVE
I have, (so I could do the mass delete) :-
https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-download-your-twitter-archive
Getting out of SUSPENDED by Twitter
First up, unless they tell you at the outset (which they sometimes do if it’s a single tweet that they don’t like) Twitter support are unlikely to offer any help at all about what, specifically, you did wrong. Ask them, but don’t hold your breath.
Unless you have been posting vitriol, posting vast numbers of tweets, doing mass following/unfollowing or other spammy crap, it’s almost certainly just a matter of adjusting your Profile and Settings.
Steps to take, and to be honest, just do all of them, then get back to support and ask for reinstatement.
- Header Image : delete it.
- Profile pic : nice smiling headshot that a Nun would be happy to post.
- Settings : make sure you have set that ALL your Tweets are marked as sensitive. Settings, Privacy and Safety, Your Tweets, Mark Sensitive.
This will work in most cases.
Shadowbanning
TLDR – Yes, you probably are partly shadowbanned. In adult, we all are, live with it.
But also sort of not really a thing in the way most people think. You are not invisible. (If you pissed Twitter off that much, you’re suspended or cancelled).
What IS a thing seems to be that Accounts that have by default stated that all their media is sensitive – mature / adult – which most adult industry people do, and whose social graph (connections and activity) seems strongly linked to adult stuff, (so, again, most of us) are likely to be excluded or downgraded in search a lot of the time.
If you use a site like https://shadowban.yuzurisa.com/ to check your status expect to have the search bans on, but worry if you have a Ghost Ban or Reply Deboosting. These two tend to mean that Twitter thinks you are being spammy or basically “not a real person engaged in real conversation”, so look at how you are operating. Basically, are you doing the more spammy things mentioned in the Action This Day above, and if you are, stop.
Ghost and Reply issues seem to resolve once Twitter decides you are being a normal human tweeter again.
UPDATE OCT 2021 : I suspect the Reply Deboosting (shows up as “Something went wrong”, “show more replies”) has been broadened and MAY now take in account the fact that it’s basically an NSFW account. The main of Reply Deboosting is that your replies don’t show up in feeds other than those who directly follow you. This WILL impact on organic growth, but is probably also unavoidable because, “politics”.
Note – I don’t think Twitter are really bothered by us. This is about politics. In the USA the Social Media companies rely on S230 (law) to avoid being prosecuted for what their users write. There are serious moves to alter S230, and in ALL cases, that would result in SM companies having to purge all adult/porn/SW content as it would be too dangerous for them to keep it up. Think American lawyers seeing the scope for vast damages from a free nipple.
“My son was a good Christian boy until he saw the Jezebel’s tweet, went to her site, and booked her. He got knocked over by a car as he ran from the police who had been tailing her and will be in a wheelchair for life….”
And you are suing Twitter because? “They are responsible. Without them, nothing would have happened”.
Nothing to do with them being a billion dollar company? “No, nothing to do with that at all”.
Anyway, Twitter is libertarian by instinct, but also has to show that it does it best to stop little Johnny finding the naughty unless he actually tries.
Update : someone complained that there seems to be no actual numbers published re what causes trouble. My take – IF there are numbers, Twitter will never release them, because then people would game the system. BUT ALSO, it’s probably an automated AI/fuzzy logic thing rather than a simple score card.
Dealing with a Permanent Ban
They are very good at finding you again. We’re not sure what they use, but seems to be your account details, inc bio, and possibly IP and hardware profiling.
Nothing is sure to work, but these instructions might help. No harm in trying.
So, delete the app. Ideally get a different phone. But def delete the app and then reinstall it.
Use a new email address and new @. Ensure both are quite different to the old one. Close matches seem to get spotted. (If you have a web site with us, it comes with multiple email addresses included, no extra charge, ask me).
DO NOT use the same phone number.
DO NOT use the same URLs in your Bio. Maybe create a Pinned tweet with them.
Use a different images in your profile.
Make sure you follow the rules to the letter. (In theory this doesn’t work, it was a PERMANENT ban, but it can’t do any harm).
Consider making it private. This can be tricky if it’s a marketing tool, but you can still do professional networking this way for making content etc.
Key Links