Emo Roller Coaster for FightBackBetter.com: Most Successful Tweet So Far But Totally Shadow Banned on Instagram – I Got the Social Media Blues and Got Nothing to Lose!
Today we had the most successful tweet so far at the @fightbackbettr (no e) It was a useful tweet given that the Democrats had planned for today to create a framework to repress opposition to genocide in NJ. The tweet was sent to the Democratic Party NJ Senators and Assembly Members and the governor. The tweet gathered nearly 2.2K views – which by twitter standards is no big deal but for FightBackBetter was best to date. The end result of all of the pressures on Trenton is that the planned vote today was postponed which FightBackBetter believes is a major but not final victory toward protecting our expressive rights in NJ. We still are poised with the rest of the state for the next moves of the Genocrats to try to maneuver this through. Whether the tweet campaign and the articles at FightBackBetter played a role in helping to cancel today’s vote – the bottom line is that it was the sum total of all the work done today and in recent days – all of the lobbying, calls, e-mails, the physical presence and everything written about it by all opposing the repressive measures. Hats off to all but lets get ready for the next round.
So on the other hand, @FightBackBetter is absolutely forestalled from gaining traction in Instagram – which is where much of the Palestine support work is promoted. We are totally shadow banned with minimal circulation in the feed even among the close to 1000 followers we have – they mostly are not seeing our postings. We can not follow other accounts and we are prevented from “liking” on posts and comments. These bans are lasting multiple weeks and were never explained and no warnings given – just Insta doing the Kafkaesque META thing of repressing empire challenging efforts – in this case support for Palestine. In addition comments made by the Insta @FightBackBetter account are routinely removed with threats to cancel the account completely.
While the plan has been to attempt to draw some help in from the Palestine supportive activists on Instagram – there is so much activity and so many other initiatives it is hard to compete. The only way now for FightBackBetter.com to penetrate our message into Instagram would be to have a team to daily repost our materials onto popular Instagram pages and to do stories as well. I have reached out to some but have not successfully line up that support at this time.
For now I still have the account though so as far as broadcasting and amplifying the information within Instagram – something the repressive platform makes almost impossible to do with its freakish repression of any easy way to put links into messaging – I can still play that role. But if @fightbackbetter gets shut down on Instagram completely – I am expecting it to happen – I will no longer have access to the postings to link to and report upon on upcoming activities as well reports on events. The only way that could be made to work would be if there was support from people using Insta to spread messages to also drop the messages to FightBackBetter – an operation that can be easily put in place to support. Getting people to do the effort to help get the data to us though will be the hard part.
The best part of the story is that the website traffic continues to build. Whether that will continue is a challenge and we have not reached the beginning of the proverbial acceleration curve. The site I believe is informing the media which continues to make sure that they hide the fact of the strong NJ movement as the site easily and clearly demonstrates – evidence of a powerful movement the media continues to ignore. But I also believe and can not prove that the site has helped accelerate several important stories on the these issues to break in the mainstream media. I do believe that the reporters and editors are giving side eye to the site – probably laughing at me. There is other power that the site is demonstrating that I wish to share with everyone if I can encourage greater participation.
The Instagram challenge is surmountable if I could organize some popular twitter accounts to carry our materials regularly. I also have to start building the support to get the data that is going into Insta into another stream toward FightBackBetter.com to streamline the process but also to handle the situation if and when @fightbackbetter gets the total boot from Insta .
The twitter challenge is to build a Palestine Tweet Street and the first step toward those with twitter accounts who would not mind spending literally seconds daily to amplify all of the articles at @FightBackBetter to 1000s of people in twitter land – just jumping on our page and RTweeting “any good ones” (articles) in the daily delivery (of course this editor believes they are ALL good ones).
The other challenge is to build a network of folks who administer and participate in WhatsApp, Discord and other organizing tools to pick out the important links to drop into those outlets and to develop some means of a distribution network for links.
The stronger the connection of FightBackBetter to a true audience will increase the power to challenge the media silence – it is shameful for the media to be breaking stories several days after they are posted here and that IS happening! If they are not stories – why do they end up covering them. And if they ARE stories – why don’t we work together to get the perspectives across accurately and in a timely way!
Also I have collaborated literally with dozens of groups and individuals and am very fond of the collaborative relationships and the potential they represent for future shared work toward this struggle!
FREE PALESTINE!
