Howdy. I've been watching this situation develop over probably several months, and like everyone else, there's just so much wrong with Twitter/X as a platform that it might as well be totally written off. But I wanted to take a second to comment on Elon's Nazi Parlor.
SFW content, NSFW blog; and we're covering some recent personal observations I don't have good data on. If you have good data, please comment or share with your expansions, it would be graciously appreciated.
Furry Artist Journals announcing permanent suspensions from Twitter on Furaffinity.net have increasingly been happening to more people, two in my inbox at time of writing and maybe three or four others I can remember over the last 3 months. At first I suspected a bot, but then I got some high resolution information this morning which turned suspicion into confirmation. I'm sure for many Twitter/X news following people, these events aren't new, but for a lot of us who care about Queer topics about deplatforming and other "obscenity" measures this'll continue to be an important consideration.
A furaffinity artist who doesn't draw all that extreme or unusual content being banned randomly makes you think it's due to bad conduct. Two makes you think it's something odd, and by about six who draw pretty normal stuff (think, pokemon girls with tits that are mostly anthro, attractive furry guys, etc) being yeeted, there's a question of what it is. The high resolution data I got today from one former Twitter/X user detailed a back and forth with the company's ghost ship crew of moderators about being 'wrongly flagged as a bot', which eventually saw them terminated. What's interesting here is that the exchange started off and escalated rather rapidly after a few days. The user took several steps to try to ensure their account wasn't being used by a bot for spam, and that didn't save them.
Despite this all, they were just a furry artist posting normal content in their normal attitude. With the increasingly hard to assess reasoning for why bans are happening on the site, I am going to go ahead and tap the sign that there may be more intent here. Twitter is in the process of getting horrifically murdered and if it does plan to pivot, perhaps chasing NSFW off the platform is a goal. My conspiracy theory here is that random and systemic bans are sweeping through popular porn artists and content creators who are hosting stuff on the platform, and if it isn't within a certain threshold of acceptability it'll be deplatformed. It seems that Twitter/X may be using automated moderation to explicitly deplatform NSFW creators. You have to be noteworthy enough to be detected, so my meterstick here is that many of these artists had around 5 to 10k or more followers. That seems small, but it's significant for furry artists who are drawing pretty run of the mill content.
[Edit]: I note follower count as part of the equation, but I wanna also mention that it does seem very random, and this feature was simply my estimation based on memory or the self-report of people contacted. Many artists I'd suspect would get banned haven't been banned, and some that I have not suspected would have been banned are banned. It seems like a very fluid situation, more on it later.
Reminder to Decentralize your Online Alias, Today!
That means opening accounts on multiple platforms and posting to several locations, plus ensuring things you like are saved on local drives that won't be cleared if some company randomly decides to flip a switch.
More on this situation as it develops, just like the ongoing situation with Patreon likely going public in 2024, despite having closed my account on Twitter/X by now I am still keeping tabs on it.