A Writer's Revenge: How I Fought Elon

The Cyberfascism Chronicles

Quick Note: the following is an account of events that took place over the past year and a half. I may be based in Greece, but in the age of the Dopamine Dystopia cyber Hitlers can shut you down wherever you live. DOGE may be a US government department, but the tech oligarchy is global.

---

Like many other independent authors, I grew a considerable part of my audience over the years on Twitter, beginning around 2019. It may have been a toxic place even back then, but sifting through all the decomposing trash you could eventually find your tribe. Twitter seemed to be the perfect practice medium for any writer who wanted to improve their craft and build an audience at the same time. Before the premium subscription options rolled in, (which still haven’t saved Twitter from bankruptcy), the limit on number of characters per tweet was a fantastic way for a writer to practice maximizing impact while minimizing language. Many of my books were first “tested” on Twitter as quotes, aphorisms, excerpts or ideas for future essays yet to be written. As with all writing, a great chapter begins with a great sentence, and a great sentence with a great word, image or thought that magically appears while you’re bending down to tie your shoes or looking out the window.

After building a substantial following on Twitter over the years, a steady trickle of book sales begun coming in as a welcome side effect, which turned into a monthly influx of pocket money. It was during this same period that my corporate career was finally beginning to destroy me both physically and mentally, after a gruesome 19 years of a rat race to nowhere. I eventually gave up a highly paid job in London’s Canary Wharf not because I planned to, but so that I can literally save my life.

And then the ground disappeared from beneath my feet, just as that pocket money was becoming important to me. Elon took over Twitter and his Nazi algorithms began selecting which posts users actually saw on their feeds. My book sales dwindled as paid Twitter subscriptions rolled in, turning the platform into a class war between those who had money to promote their propaganda and those who didn’t. So much for “democratic” social media. The viral days of organic engagement were over for good, but this was only a taste of what was about to happen next.

My “niche” on Twitter was, and had always been, same as my books: climate activism, eco-philosophy, degrowth, socialism, and the polycrisis theme I call systemic trauma and the civilisational lie – and yes, I did talk about current news such as Palestine and Ukraine. I was more or less Elon’s worst nightmare combination of anti-business sentiment, anti-natalism and “The Left”, as he calls it. At some point not too long ago, I managed to become one of the biggest climate crisis and overshoot voices on Twitter, boasting some 34,000 followers and occasionally invited on podcasts. As I saw my retweets, likes and shares dramatically decrease with the onset of Elon’s algorithm sorcery, I also experienced something else which few others had experienced, at least to the extent I have: a systematic, relentless, massive attack from AI bots which went on for months and months during the US pre-election period. The comment section of all my tweets was now flooded with hundreds of the most hateful, death-wishing, racist, homophobic and sadistic replies all of which were targeted personally towards me, served alongside climate crisis-denying propaganda. I must have been shortlisted as public enemy number one for Elon, given the incredible resource that was being thrown specifically at me in order to break down my morale. It was a truly incredible undertaking, and this is why it must have been coordinated centrally from somewhere, but commissioned out to bot-generation nurseries who could reliably produce this much volume and variety of hate speech - now easily boosted directly to the top of each comment feed through post sponsoring. Elon had done everything he possibly could on this platform to actively amplify abuse and misinformation. Many of these bot accounts had the blue tickmark next to their profile image caricature, which was usually a cartoon character, Hollywood actor or the usual MAGA vomit of US flags, bald eagles etc. They were all fakes.

Being accustomed to group bullying and abuse since my playground days as a queer loner geek in the 80s, I pressed on with my work despite the highly imaginative daily death wishes that promptly arrived in the comment section. Although I made full use of the “Block” feature, it was completely useless: the more you blocked, the more bots would be generated. The content of the abuse I was receiving was incredibly specific and personal, made to convince me that it was coming from real humans that “knew me”. The bots were replying to the specific content of my tweets, not simply screaming random copy-and-paste abuse coming from a list. Still, I could tell they were bots because of the sheer punctuality and volume of their responses which seemed to come in distinct waves and triggered when I included specific hashtags in my posts.

The other giveaway of course was that none of them had a real profile picture or any info in their profile. They also had barely any followers, meaning that these were recently created accounts. They were mosquito bots that had been auto-hatched specifically for short-lived nuisance and abuse: designed to live only for a few hours in order to do their nasty work before users block or report them. It is quite likely that some of them came with an auto-destruct expiration to begin with: their role was to take up my time, create havoc and disruption, then auto-disappear as the original tweet aged into oblivion anyway. For the vast majority of bots though, their footprint remained: crowding out any meaningful discussion in my threads and discouraging my readers from participating in this cacophony of shitposts, insults and MAGA vomit. The comment section of my posts became a treacherous war zone no one in their right mind would want to enter, even if you paid them.

The good thing was that my rate of engagement wasn’t all that bad. A good section of my “tribe” could still see my content and links to my articles. The golden days were definitely over, but I was still able to do my activism on this platform. If anything, the fact that a large-scale coordinated attack had been launched against me made me feel that I must have been doing something right to attract all this attention. I was a real f*****g menace. GOOD.

The real turning point in my saga on Twitter came the morning immediately after the US election, or perhaps a few days after, if I remember correctly. The abuse bots had suddenly disappeared, dwindling from thousands to ZERO. It was another piece of proof that these had never been real people, however specific and targeted their comments were. How could they possibly be real humans when all these profiles were simultaneously turned off with such incredible synchronicity? It means they were all obeying the same master. They had all originated in the same, central place, either nested within the offices of X itself or in a remote data centre overseas which worked in close collaboration with Twitter engineers on “special operations” like my case – most likely funded by the fossil fuel industry and definitely overseen by Elon Musk. Because this wasn’t only about passively allowing abusive bots on the platform. There was algorithm sorcery happening, and there is only one power that can do that, the one which controls the algorithms: Twitter and its dark Lord of The Nazis. The mere thought that this slimy, spineless, conniving little creature may have, at some point, overexerted their decomposing ketamine brain cells to review a “termination” list of activists which included my name, is the definition of cyberfascism: you will never really know who your oppressor is.

What is more, all previous records of the months-long abuse had completely vanished from the platform immediately post-election, along with any trace of bots. Months and months of tens of thousands of hate comments and death wishes enough to file serious litigation, magically gone in an instant. I guess Nazi Elon was covering his tracks. Even the hashtag #climatecrisis, by far my most-used hashtag and the one guaranteed to automatically and instantly trigger hundreds of bots, failed to autogenerate the abuse machine. I guess now that the election had been won by the Christonazis, the bots weren’t needed anymore.

But there was another reason why the bots were not needed: my account was now simply worthless anyway. My posts had been made invisible to almost everyone but me, as Elon became emboldened by his new superpowers to do something he would not dare to do before the election: to outright shadow ban people, without a reason or explanation. The bots had disappeared, simply because I was not a threat anymore: the Cyber Hitler had terminated me outright. My account’s visibility to my audience vanished overnight, after more than half a decade on the platform. I still post occasionally as I prepare my final exit from the platform, but the standard traffic these days is that I will get a handful of likes in the first few seconds of posting, followed by complete silence – hardly an algorithmic response and indicative of some serious fascist intervention here. This, on an account that still has 28,000 followers and which used to get dozens and hundreds of retweets at the very minimum within the first few hours of posting.

Curious to document and understand this (also because I am a scientist and a data geek), shortly after the election result I started measuring my click-through engagement from Twitter - that is, the number of people who click links to my articles from my posts and enter into my own web domain, tsakraklides.com. I chose this specific metric because it is a true reflection of engagement, much more so than likes or retweets. It not only indicates volume of people exposed to, and engaging with my content, it clearly shows whether Twitter’s algorithm displays my content to my most engaged fans, as a social media algorithm naturally should. In my case it didn’t, and I was receiving messages from readers reporting that I had completely disappeared from their feed. Over the 67 days post-election when I conducted this monitoring (see chart), the meaningful click-through engagement to my Twitter content became worthless.

But the gradual downward slope of the data curve demonstrates that this was not a sudden turning off, but a carefully planned, slow “phasing out” of my account which Nazi Elon was hoping would go unnoticed. But I’ve got the numbers right here to show the world, right in this chart. Even considering the millions of people leaving Twitter during that period, it still does not account for this sharp downward trend down to zero. Throughout the interval when this data was collected my posting activity was steady and consistent, yet the account was clearly phased out of existence over a two to three-month period.

Fascism in the cyber age is not only about tanks, sieg heils or house arrests. It is about online obliteration. Elon tried to make me disappear, to professionally assassinate me like he has with tens of thousands of his DOGE victims and regulatory agencies that were already investigating him. He will routinely destroy lives, then suck on some ketamine and go on Fox news asking existential questions like “why do people hate me so much?”. Every time I saw a Cybertruck on fire on TV, it was as if that Molotov cocktail was being flung out of my own hand. Destroying Cybertrucks was labelled as “terrorism”, yet destroying hundreds of thousands of American families wasn’t.

So what was the next step? I wasn’t ready to give up, sulk or disappear – let alone abandon my own followers, people who had known me for years and many of whom probably thought I had suddenly vanished off the face of the Earth. I set myself the genuinely insane, monumentally impossible task of direct messaging 30,000 followers, because this is what you do in a time of cyberfascism. You go underground, use what you’ve got, and you rediscover the tools of the stone age. Sadly for Nazi Elon, my DMs still work and about 12,000 people have already received my “hello, I HAVEN’T DIED” message along with alternate sites where they can follow me - a message which takes a gruesome 7 taps on the smartphone or desktop per follower to send (that’s 84,000 taps so far). But this hasn’t stopped me. I have enough anger to keep me going, and I dearly miss my community of readers. I will still be tapping away for weeks to come. Hesitantly I bought a premium subscription for the month so that I can send the rest of these messages, before I officially leave Shitter, taking thousands with me. It is the least I can do for Nazi Elon.

In search of some semblance of freedom of speech, one of the new platforms I’ve joined is Substack. Although I’m told they allow far-right speech, at least they don’t go out of their way to obliterate climate activism and social justice debate. It’s a level playing field perhaps? Who knows what the latest journalist rights fad may be in this cyberjungle. One of my readers commented, “so you’ve joined Only Fans for writers”, an undeserving comment. Not only is it insulting to sex workers, who are far more honest and useful to society than any highly paid politician, but it underscores a perception by some that authors do not deserve to make a living out of what they do, especially when it is activism. You’re supposed to overthrow the regime, but it is immoral to raise funds to do this, while perfectly acceptable for others to do so in order to become the regime. Writers are expected to either starve to death or take up capitalist jobs that destroy society and the environment, rather than make it their full-time job to use the gift that they have to try and change this corrupt world one page at a time, one shadow banned account at a time, one overdue electric bill at a time.

But this perception is hardly surprising. Our civilisation has made exploitation the mainstream driver of society to the extent that, if someone tries to support themselves doing something noble that they actually care about, it raises serious concerns: they are trying to cheat the oppressive capitalist system, “grifting” as they say, because what they do is not “real work”. This sounds like Elon propaganda.

Critics of the system were always portrayed as lazy troublemakers, not to mention envied by people who would fail to muster either the honesty, nobility, ability, and most definitely none of the courage to do the troublemaking themselves. They work their 9 to 5 unethical jobs, as I did for 20 years, and label those fighting to end those same unethical, bullshit jobs as hopeless idealist losers. Why should they support your “writing hobby”? It obviously doesn’t register as a “job”, for the simple reason that it doesn’t destroy the world, the environment, or the soul.

“These damn hobby activists, they have it too easy”, Elon would probably say, in the same way he talked about US federal workers’ uselessness. So let’s revisit this page again when society realises that it needs activism and activists more than it does titty-baby cyberlords who stay up all night in the White House playing video games and tampering with algorithms. Let me tell you, this broligarchy ain’t gonna overthrow itself.

While you’re here: the climate crisis, ecological apocalypse and civilisational overshoot are real, and caused by capitalism and Elon psychopaths. This polycrisis will annihilate everything on Earth unless we rethink “how we do” civilisation – and who we put in charge of it. Now go out there and play in the spring sunshine…

If you want to encourage my voice, please support my work by becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter so that it can continue. This newsletter is my main income. I have minimal overheads, no sponsors I sell myself to, bosses who tell me what to write (or NOT write), or staff I have to pay. I’m here for you, raw and dedicated. Your support is appreciated.

George is an author, scientist and researcher covering the polycrisis

My Books

tsakraklides.com