For those who prefer a volunteer has read the article out
The day began like any other weekday morning: 5:00 a.m., coffee, couch, X. The sequence had become muscle memory — the glow of the feed and the sunrise, the scroll as steady as breathing. For nearly five years, it had been my quiet ritual before the noise of the day began.
But October 8, 2025, I didn’t follow the script.
After my usual scroll — reading, replying, reposting — I shared a graphic and an article with two accounts: ConceptualJames and LauraLoomer. Both were dissecting the strange theater of the extreme right™. The graphic came straight from the article; I added it beneath LauraLoomer’s post because her replies were swarmed by bots, and under ConceptualJames because he’d shared the same piece the day before but missed that particular image.
About ten minutes later, a notification appeared:
“Your account has been temporarily labeled.”
No reason. No context. Just the mark.
I appealed immediately, but the appeal process felt like speaking into a void — all automation, no acknowledgment. There was no field for confusion, no room for language beyond the dropdown menu. I followed the steps, pressed “submit,” and waited.
While waiting, I posted again — a simple screenshot of the label itself. Within 33 minutes, a new message arrived:
“After careful review, your account has been permanently suspended.”
The reason: “Rules Against Authenticity.”
The words were surgical — clean, impersonal, and final.
I tried to appeal again. That’s when I fell into what I can only describe as a digital labyrinth. Click the appeal link — “You’re not logged in.” Log in — “We don’t recognize you.” Reset password. Two-factor verification. “We aren’t sure it’s you.” Locked out. Repeat.
It was a flawless system of loops — a process that consumes your time and your patience until you realize it isn’t designed to resolve anything. It’s designed to outlast you.
Meanwhile, X two days later quietly deducted $40 from my account for my monthly subscription. The algorithm that silenced me had no trouble charging me for the privilege.
Silenced by AI, but Still Billed for Obedience
When I first joined Twitter, suspensions had faces. You could imagine someone on the other side — biased, maybe, but human. The old system punished dissent through choice. The new one does it through indifference.
X Safety recently announced the removal of 3.5 million accounts for “…breaching our X rules...” I liked that post when I saw it. It felt like a necessary act of cleansing. But now I wonder — how does anyone verify a claim like that? Who decides what qualifies as threats, or manipulation, or dissent, when the judge is an algorithm auditing its own logic?
I still believe in moderation — in blocking actual threats, spam, and deception. But when my account, followed by journalists, authors, podcasters, and public thinkers, is flagged as a manipulator, I have to ask: how many others are mislabeled? How many voices are being quietly deleted under the guise of @X policy?
To be silenced by X’s algorithm is not to vanish. It’s to remain — visible but inaudible. You can scroll but not speak. You can read but not reply. You can still pay. You always pay.
Somewhere inside the system, my file persists — tagged, archived, sealed with the designation “resolved.”
The feed moves on. The machine hums. The silence becomes part of the noise.
Cue The Terminator Music
That’s the quiet genius of the system: you never stop being useful to it, even when you’ve been silenced by it.
You don’t vanish. You persist — logged, categorized, and charged monthly.
The machine never apologizes. The feed never pauses.
And somewhere, buried in the circuitry of X, a record of my voice endures — marked as noise, archived as spam, and left to fade in the endless scroll.
Cue The Terminator theme — only this time, there’s no uprising, no warning, no final battle.
Just a quiet click, somewhere.
And the sound of your voice turning off by algorithm.
Silence used to mean peace. Now it means digital erasure of conscientious by algorithm.
mkayuokay (StopBSWorkCulture) is an anonymous commentator once active on X, where they mixed commentary on current events, support for Israel, reposts of Correspondence Theory, and skeptical reflections on technology, censorship, and current cultural events. Their writing often circled back to the Quakers — not out of admiration, but as a study in how good intentions, stripped of the sacred, can curdle into something quietly corrosive.