UPDATE It is astonishing how many people are incapable of comprehending the following phrase from the article below:
The account still exists and is visible online
Yes, I know the account is still there. The problem is I am locked out from my account and bizarrely, when I try to recover it the process ends with an automated meassage saying there is no such account.
An extraordinary number of people in comments on Facebook, Twitter and below the line here are triumphantly posting that they can still find the account, with the implication I am not blocked. I know it is still there. I said that. I have been locked out of it.
END OF UPDATE
I appear to have been banned from Twitter. For over a week I have not been able to log in to my account.
When I enter the password it takes me automatically to the Help Centre, where an automated message tells me the account @craigmurrayorg does not exist. When I enter my email address and phone number it tells me it has no record of them.
All this on a 15 year old blue tick account with 110,000 followers.
The account still exists and is visible online, though very difficult to find because of extreme shadowbanning.
Although my account has been heavily shadowbanned for years, until now this has never shown up in the shadowban test sites.
The reason for this is that my account has been previously limited by twitter not showing my tweets to my followers, which the shadowban test sites cannot test for. It has not previously been shadowbanned from searches, which they can test for.
The additional shadowbanning on the account has come into place at approximately the same time Twitter locked me out, which seems to rule out the removal of my account access being a technical glitch.
The wordpress to twitter function has also been blocked, by which posts on this blog were tweeted out on my twitter account. That is an entirely different mechanism to the normal login, so again this is not a technical password glitch.
This was my last tweet before I was banned. With no other information from Twitter, I can only presume this tweet prompted the ban.
Every attempt to use the appeal mechanisms that exist when a twitter account is suspended or banned, are closed off by a message that the account does not exist and they have no record of my contact details, which is absolutely not true.
Over half the traffic to this website comes via twitter. On this website I express in mild and sometimes intellectual terms my dissent from the neoliberal world view.
In the past two years this has caused me to be jailed, to be interviewed about leaks on another matter by the Police, to be thrown out of the National Union of Journalists, to have two laptops stolen, to have my facebook account hacked and my twitter account blocked.
The warning bells for the freedoms of speech and dissent we took for granted in western society could not be ringing louder nor more clearly.
I cannot of course take to twitter to tell people I have been blocked by twitter. I should be most grateful if those of you with twitter accounts could tweet about this and link to this post. Please do the same on any other social media which you use.
May I ask if you have thought about subscribing to support this blog and my work, that you do so now? The efforts to cut off my social media reach and traffic to this site are also of course a threat to the income which supports me.
But the site will as always remain free and open, and the content is free to republish and repost elsewhere, including in translation.
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Mr. Murray, in your article you share a screenshot, there was a green checkmark at Reply Deboosting sort of ban. I’ve just repeated your test and it shows that Reply Deboosting sort of ban is active, too.
I screenshoted the test result, hope you can see it https://prnt.sc/iWyBxRHttKY9
The description says this measure is enforced for harmful behaviour, or, for offensive accounts.
I just posted:
.@TwitterSupport I follow @CraigMurrayOrg. He says when he tries to get access to his account a message says it does not exist though it all seems to be visible. Please resolve this.
What you are suffering, Craig, is endemic and highly indicative of a now rapidly failing fascist regime which can no longer survive and prosper in the ignorance that abounds and surrounds one as it was able to do so freely before.
Things have radically changed and there are other prime field agents commanding and commending novel disruptive definitive operations both with and for necessarily smarter customer clients/foreign beings/alien personnel addressing and exploiting the advantages granted to all via AIdDevelopments and greater remote open source virtual education.
Here is a present example of just such a current opportunity with vast explosive potential ….. https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/01/16/china_infsec_industry_growth_plan/#c_4602060
Strange as it may seems, is not Julian Assange locked up in Belmarsh for something not a great deal dissimilar, and how crazy and corrupt does that tell one and all the current established system is/the powers that be are?
Interesting times ahead indeed with all manner of new future feeds and seeds planted and flowering.
Might just be a computer glitch rather than active censorship – otherwise it’s odd they would claim no record of you and yet leave your account visible.
Yes, CM leaping to silly conclusions. It’s just another of those unfortunate occurences that has the quite incidental effect of intimidating/ excluding/ silencing him.
December 3, 2010 PayPal blocked WikiLeaks account
December 6, 2010 Swiss bank PostFinance blocked Assange’s account
December 7, 2010 Visa and MasterCard blocked payments to WikiLeaks account
December 9, 2010 Facebook and Twitter started banning Assange supporter’s accounts
Well, I find it too many glitches.
I recall WikiLeaks published docs on Syria, encrypted. There was a promise to give out the key in case of… I suspect, Mr.Murrays laptops were stolen by someone, who may try to get the key. How do you like the idea? To me it seems plausible. Mr. Murray was going to meet Assange’s supporters, so his laptop was definitely of interest for some sinister security services.
There seem to be a technical problem with their backend. I just tested a handful of accounts, including corporate accounts, and some of them show as “unable to complete a test for technical reasons” while others work fine. There’s nothing controversial about these accounts, and so the only conclusion is a technical glitch. It should normally resolve within the next 24-48h, unless Musk has fired the guy who knew how it all worked.
Seems like your account has been shadowbanned in an atypical way.
https://twitter.com/search?q=from:CraigMurrayOrg returns no results when logged out.
It may be malicious or may be because of the account has been classified as compromised due to multiple login attempts.
Once again a humble advice: avoid public email providers; use own domain for key email.
Funny that my Twitter account is also showing as shadowbanned, even though I hardly use Twitter at all, and post nothing of controversial nature.
Although I have serious doubts that the new owner of Twitter is not a charlatan, and there’s no doubt the security services of various countries would happily kick Craig off Twitter if they could, I wonder if there is another thing to consider.
When the new owner finally took control of the company he fired some 30% of the software engineering team, and told the rest of the team the system was too complicated, and that the production architecture needed to be simplified. So they complied with his request, which started to break stuff (IIRC if you had 2FA set up they you could no longer sign in on mobile, because a key system had been decommissioned).
See https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/musk_twitter_rpc_spat/
See also: https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/14/third_party_twitter_clients_stop_working/
So it is possible we are seeing the same. I guess it depends on how helpful the support teams are – they surely can see what we can see, which is that @craigmurrayorg does indeed exist. They should escalate the problem to second-level engineers.
OYOH, such an environment on Twitter could have been seized upon as a good time to up the shadowbanning of Craig whilst there was an additional level of plausible deniability, similar to waiting until he was travelling round Germany to steal his laptop.
I guess it’s not out of the question. But it would be a pretty amateur effort – they might at least have removed the direct account link if it was deliberate. And indeed if they had done that, the audit trail of that account having existed cannot be removed from the internet.
Of course the claim that “the account does not exist” won’t wash – but customer service in many corporations is woeful. Perhaps there’s an idiot at the other end trying to close support tickets as quickly as possible, to meet a performance target, even when the issues contained within are not actually resolved.
“But it would be a pretty amateur effort – they might at least have removed the direct account link if it was deliberate.”
Not if you look on this and other hassles as gaslighting: the ambiguities then become a feature, not a bug.
As far as I’m familiar with IT people, commerce IT, general commerce and trade, and to little extent with what a state budget may meant for them… I guess those unhappy fired workers got big deal of data taken away. For money. Hoping to sell the data (or access) for good money, to govt agencies.
I very much doubt it. Software engineers working for Twitter in Seattle would have been earning $200-400K each, plus stock options. Not only can they afford to pick and choose their next role with some care, and not only will they get snapped up quickly, but their reputation and integrity is going to matter a lot to them. They won’t be able to move to other Big N companies if they are caught in the act of stealing data.
In any case, I should think there is no market for it. Twitter probably has a fire-hose directly into the three-letter agencies, and selling to anyone else would not generate much cash.
It’s an amusing assertion that software engineers are so wealthy that they would not find themselves in dire straits on being booted out of a highly paid occupation. I would guess that maintaining such a lifestyle as they could lead might indeed put them in the way of temptation, it’s not like they would be unacquainted with markets on the dark web that could lure them in. Although we hear of the occasional triumph of the triple letter agencies in the cases against the more egregious and greedy software piracy transgressors, I fear that these cases are just the tip of a much larger iceberg. Or it may be that anyone booted out of such highly paid occupations could indeed be motivated by malice alone and that will direct their efforts, regardless of any reward. So I don’t dismiss Tatyana’s assertion about the possible actions of disgruntled ex-employees. But, as far at Craig’s Twitter problem is involved, it is much easier to believe that Twitter is in some kind of administrative/organizational chaos due to a lunatic at the helm and that is what is affecting his disruption of service, rather than a malicious act by a deep state actor.
Mr Murray’s Twitter account may well be the victim of a conspiracy by state actors, anti Assange action, corporate blocking, tech savvy thieves etc
He was on the Assange tour, laptops have disappeared & he has significantly hardened his nationalist views
But this the Twitterverse
Many accounts regularly suffer access problems
This is normal
One Twitterverse solution is to simply start a new account using different email address, phone number, etc & start Tweeting
Not an ideal solution but quick and easy
When multiple Twitter accounts fail maybe Twitter doesn’t like you
After all Twitter is itself a corporation most likely under attack from many directions
Please at least try
Schrödinger’s Twitter account?
Musk has slashed admin / moderation roles, and appears to be trying to ‘free the bird’ from pettifogging western govt interference and attempts to micromanage dissent: shadow bans /de-amplification /removing accounts. Maybe someone messing with you, before Musk’s social libertarian wave reaches European shores?
Did Craig have two factor authentication switched on?
They appear to have disabled access for all 3rd party APIs. I presume you aren’t trying to log in with a 3rd party app like Twitteriffic or Tootbot? Coz if you were that could be why. That no longer works. Killing the businesses offering those apps. Awful really.
Twitter has always been terrible. I don’t read it any more anyway. Your blog’s RSS is fine, I’ll continue to see your posts here.
If you decide to look at Mastodon your best start server is likely https://mastodon.scot/
Oops, probably my fault
“But you probably want a steganography layer as well – you don’t want to send naked encrypted text. You could code into a jpg by altering slightly the pixels RBG code ( even is 1, odd 0) then just send the jpg by twitter. The receiver then extracts the encrypted text from the image and transfers it to the air gapped machine.”
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2022/12/trains-mostly-planes-and-automobiles-part-4/comment-page-1/#comments
Your last tweet had a jpg in it, not a link to The Guardian. While I apologize I had to find some way to convince the Australia nat sec community to stop killing their own police officers in order to justify more surveillance powers
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/queensland-massacre-sparks-warning-over-new-threat-turbocharged-by-social-media/cbx3z28zs
I hoped waving the idea of messages encrypted in jpgs in front of them might give them a nice new rabbit hole to run down for a bit. The idea that people are sharing conspiracy theories by encrypted apps is nuts, of course. They are waving them all over reddit, twitter, facebook etc en clair.
I am sure Elon Musk will relent eventually.
Craig, I would suggest you contact Twitter directly.
Do they have an office in the UK?
Craig, can you use GDPR as a route to gain some attention from different people at Twitter?
I’m not active on Twitter, but if Elon saw this, he’d do something about it. He will know who you are, without a shade of doubt.
What is GDPR???
An EU regulation to protect personal and commercial data. It is frequently misused in the UK to deny information to people and to hide incompetence and corruption. It doesn’t apply outside the EU and doesn’t apply to data held on, for example, american servers. The UK is looking to withdraw from GDPR.
At the end of the day we live under a fascist state where comment is suppressed or hidden through all manner of interventions.
Free speech, free comment is not something that we have in the UK or wider afield. It may not come across to most people as the jack boot in the face, or the broken bones of a baton, but it is every bit as real. And of course jailing of political opponents are a part of it too.
Of course back in the 30’s hundreds and hundreds of thousands in Germany, and millions across occupied Europe went off to the camps, many under the cover of Nacht Und Nabel. Humanity, for the most part is a complacent placid gullible species hugely at risk.
The Jews, Homosexuals and Political Dissidents most certainly found that out, sadly too late in 1930’s
Germany. But look at the utter misery and devastation that is Ukraine as the people reportedly fight to the last person standing. I’ll bet their media, is pretty skewed.
And so the Twitter and Facebook bans, together with web site attacks are all part of that system. We disregard it at our absolute peril. Without openness, chaos prevails
In America they have the right to bear arms. A right I understand predicated on the thinking that it would allow citizens to bear arms against a government that goes against them and a right not too difficult to understand. Sadly that right where the country is flooded with guns has turned into a societal holocaust where over 20,000 US citizens are killed every year by guns. And therein now lies the big problem with the broken political system that is the USA. How long before the US breaks down with militias, armed militias fighting a broken down and rotten system. A Northern Ireland of sorts, only potentially bigger.
You can only hold control for so long controlling the media, taking down surreptitiously political opponents, denying real democracy. But ultimately all such control breaks down and often with disastrous societal effects.
The USA, the UK and to a lesser extent other NATO countries are absolutely pumping weaponry into Ukraine, a country not unknown for corruption, and now a state in utter chaos. How long for this weaponry emerges in other theatres as the weapons get sold on with no controls.
Most probably is already. But as I say the gullible, placid and complacent don’t care, until it’s too late, and then they die.
But I digress. History repeats, and repeats, and repeats.
Social media is a commercial enterprise designed to make profit. It is not free because you sign over all your rights and data when you join, your private information is the product that generates the profit. Social media has nothing to do with free speech, let’s stop repeating this nonsense. The Social media organisations are in bed with the establishments apparatus and military and security personnel are embedded in the Social media companies at all levels. Social media and free speech is part of the blue pill fed to the masses. Enjoy your freedoms, they are not real.
I’ve shared this to both FB and Twitter.
Exactly so Stevie Boy.
Here’s a bit about Big Pharma getting Twitter to censor.call for Big Pharma to provide cheap vaccine to underdeveloped countries.
Western biotech firms pressured Twitter to censor calls for sharing their Covid-19 vaccine patents and making low-cost generic treatments, according to a new tranche of Twitter files. The companies also funded a nonprofit that created tools to fight misinformation, but declined to flag misleading claims by Big Pharma.
The lobbying efforts by companies including BioNTech, Pfizer and Moderna were detailed on Monday by The Intercept writer Lee Fang, based on internal Twitter communications. It’s his second contribution to the Twitter Files, a series of reports by several journalists, who were offered access to the platform’s documents by Elon Musk, after he bought the company.
Have you tried to write to
https://help.twitter.com/forms/general
Used to work for me in pre-Musk times
If I were you I should try to contact Elon Musk directly. You are a quite important journalist (among other things) and the way you are being treated looks like a perfect example of what he says he is trying to stop.
Haha. “If only Stalin knew what’s going on..”
?
Sounds like youre being swarmed by bots and sockpuppets Craig.
Standard practice im afraid.
So sorry to hear that, I was banned in the same manner for supporting Catalonia and speaking out against Spain at a certain point in time. No access to complain or claim for my rights or else. Just a full-on cutout! Please open up a Telegram Account and any other options you might find. For many, these are times to go under. Another possibility is to open up many many accounts on Twitter and try to rescue followers I know of some folk who have more or less gotten away with it.
“The account still exists and is visible online” + “no such account”:
Doubleplusgood doublethink.
Well Murray, I didn’t get were I am today without getting fired and/or evicted a few times. So why don’t you stop playing the hard done to middle class wuss and get on with it.
Twitter ain’t the only show in town, stop making out you can’t exist and prosper without it…_
What a great comment, Digger, are you a wuss too? I mean you are coming here ever so often, why? Have some decorum.
I accept my auto-da-fé with all the decorum at my command…_
Well said.
Mr Murray had enough spare cash lying around that he was able to lend it to his business – FESTIVAL BEVERAGE AND PROPERTY SERVICES LIMITED {Company number SC594737) – realising the risk involved. Now he ‘pleads poverty’?
Life is so unfair when you make such bad choices – see his personal crusade re HMA v Salmond and resultant legal bills as another example. And proposing another crowdfunder to take on NUJ makes no sense to me either. If an applicant can show good reason for a court to waive fees then that is what happens in Scotland. [See scotcourts.gov.uk/rules-and-practice/fees]
Scottie dog is playing the man. the unionist tag team is in full swing, what a poor show.
Did you fall and bang your head?
(Nevermind, that was a rhetorical question.)
Mr Murray isn’t skint and doesn’t rely on handouts to feed himself or his family – he should stop making it seem like that’s the case. He has an ego bigger than the sum total of his self-inflicted legal bills.
When a person is targeting Craig Murray it’s not difficult to guess the type of person they are. Maybe I’m wrong.
Well, we know one thing for sure: you’re wrankling the powers that be, Craig! Good job!!!
Scottie on the gift voucher scheme.
The same thing happened to me in 2021, when I was locked out of my twitter account, no email to tell me I had been banned/suspended and I can still Google my name and find posts which I made.
Well, CM is now back tweeting. Looks like the situation has been resolved, for now.
Indeed, ET… though I expected that another UPDATE from mine host himself would have been immediately forthcoming – especially as this blog is apparently the primary conduit for revenue from twitter referrals and that the twitter ban is the subject of (t)his latest post.
Rather odd and perhaps a little unwise I’d say.
Perhaps he has been hitting the Lagavulin in celebration, and doubtless we’ll be informed of the intricacies in due season.
Do we have any explanation for both the shutdown and the resurrection of Craig’s account?
yes Lysias, the simple resumee of this spat is…don’t do twatter or trust those in charge.
I know it reaches more twits everywhere and some might even get read in the chamber of doom, but the irrelevance of such momentary flutter of wings, is no more than chatterati exchange that does not reach the masses that suffer most.
very sad.
I am not on tweeter and do not understand how in details Social media works.
But if you are right I would expect some kind of explanation/acknowledgment within few hours or at least next day. I am sorry to to say but is CM playing victim card!? He lost my 90% trust !
Is this blog side job???? Yes it doesn’t take much to make me skeptic/cynical
And being in the bad mood I question CM spending. To my understanding about £ 160 000 he spent on so called legal advice to end up in jail for 8-10 months instead 10-18 months. Very smart people at the time gave a lot of good arguments on this blog which would probably give same outcome (if not better) if CM defended himself. I am pleased that CM travels on First class trains while the proles supporting this blog travel in cattle class. You are a joke, mate!
20 shirts + ++++++ Really ? You can not be seen in the same dress outfit!
I heard that top actresses can not be seen in the same dress two times at award?
Maybe CM should take the zelensky approach, a dirty old tee shirt. Or maybe he has started a common sense approach with the red trousers and tatty Xmas jumper. Just saying, people come to see and listen to La Murray, probably couldn’t give a fig what he wears.
“To my understanding about £ 160 000 he spent on so called legal advice to end up in jail for 8-10 months instead 10-18 months. ”
That’s lawyers for you.
I wouldn’t say that our genial host is a joke, PE, but it’s maybe worth comparing his eight-month sentence for four counts of *unintentional* ‘jigsaw identification’ with the six months given to Clive Thomson who *directly named* five of the alphabetties in tweets after receiving erroneous ‘advice’ that it wouldn’t constitute contempt of court if he did it whilst abroad on holiday. The latter was defended in court by a QC (as they then were), but I doubt he spent more than a couple grand on legal counsel – and maybe nowhere near that, since he only raised £275 on GoFundMe:
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/independence-activist-who-named-alex-23564133
When you lost your laptop, the malicious actor might have logged in to your Twitter account and changed recovery details (email, phone) before finally changing the password a week ago. The only way is to contact Twitter support by phone – they should have access to the account log.
Posted to Mastodon which you may consider as a better alternative
Meanwhile NATO propaganda and media bile is being spat on Germany, which has supported Ukraine with mote than some.
Finland wants to join in the Kampf by sending German build Leopard2 to Ukraine, bar the license it signed, which says that these wrapons can not be used by a non Nato country.
Germanys Angst about a wider escalation is real, and they are well aware what happens lsst time they supported the Nazis.
As Macron will soon lose the election he can put on his fatigue, dress his teacher in Dior and move to Ukraine for some active training, see what banker boy can do for France and the rest of the western war mongers.
WHY DOES NOBODY TALK PEACE/ CEASE FIRE?
Well, there’s at least one organisation that does: https://www.stopwar.org.uk/
They don’t get a lot of publicity, though they do have hard-working volunteers, because most media systematically ignore them. I send them what little money I can afford, in addition to supporting Craig.
Unfortunately, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, “This war has ushered in a level, and magnitude, and intensity of a censorship regime unprecedented in the West.” All mainstream media are pouring out a deluge of NATO propaganda; there is hardly any so-called “journalist” questioning any of it. A huge majority of the population believes that (1) the war started suddenly in 2022 without any previous tension of any kind, (2) Ukraine under Zelensky was a model of free speech and democracy, respect for minority rights, etc.
I tested, was the ban lifted?
Hi Craig, I would like to follow you on social media but I’m not willing to use Twitter any more (I decided to boycott before Musk’s takeover and their renewed assault on free speech, and my attitude has only hardened since).
Please can you choose/advise us of a different platform that me and other people opposed to big tech monopolies can follow you on in good conscience? Cheers!
I suggest Fediverse (preferably an open, free instance such as berserker.town) or Nostr. They are open source, decentralised (and thus censorship resistant) social networks.
I have put my fediverse profile in the website field.