Being a conservative on Twitter is tricky business. Not only did you spend years fighting the supposedly liberal regime that kept your follower counts down, now you must contend with Elon Musk’s new operation, where things apparently aren’t all that much better.
Numerous conservatives have complained about Musk’s new Twitter limiting their reach since he took over and supposedly unshackled the feed from woke moral concerns.
Add Libs of TikTok, once one of Musk’s staunchest supporters and allies, to the list.
Chaya Raichik, the owner of the Libs of TikTok account, found her reach battered recently.
“Hi @elonmusk, these are just some of the messages I received in the past week. I’ve been shadowbanned for weeks now. Is there a reason why accounts are still getting throttled like this in Twitter 2.0?” she wrote on Sunday.
The tweet featured screenshots of numerous messages from Libs of TikTok fans who claimed they couldn’t find the account.
At least on Musk’s Twitter, where anti-LGBTQ content reigns, accounts that seek to demonize the community can get a swift response from the CEO.
“Your account was labeled as NSFW by our dick pic bot on 6/26,” Musk wrote, “because you posted media with nudity from Pride parades. Corrective action is to label the individual posts as NSFW, rather than the whole account. Should be fixed now.”
That Musk might have a literal dick pic bot on Twitter appeared to be news to many users, especially after Musk noted it didn’t even work all that well.
“Sometimes it thinks rocket pics are dicks, which is … crazy of course,” he wrote, meaning that Musk’s own bot could be throttling his own account on account of possible SpaceX pictures.
The specific drama around Libs of TikTok’s account being throttled stems from a fight with Twitter’s most prolific liberal posters, the Krassenstein brothers, who engaged in a days-long feud with Libs of TikTok about nudity at Pride.
In the feud, Brian Krassenstein claimed Libs of TikTok’s sharing of the video was more problematic than the nudity than itself, claiming that amplifying an isolated incident at a Pride parade would make it more likely children would see it.
It appears Twitter’s censors initially agreed. At least until Musk intervened.
