Yesterday, I found out what it means to be deplatformed.

TLDR; twitter locked my account; couldn’t verify my identity due to a bug on their website and permanently locked me out.

Here’s what happened:

It all started when I posted this tweet thread:

I am supremely excited about what is being built in OM and thus in my excitement, I started DMing a bunch of artists I know with a google forms link to apply.

Well, apparently twitter didn’t like that(twitter recently hates links or anything that takes users away from their platform).

Next thing I know:

This is a fair thing, twitter’s trying to reduce bots (thanks Elon) and this might have flagged one of their algorithms.

So I try to go ahead and reset my password which requires me to verify my mobile number

And then…

Nothing.

There is a **well documented bug **around mobile phone verification on twitter that is known for the last 2+ years but twitter has done absolutely nothing to resolve it yet.

So I open an appeal, and emailed their support a bunch of times over the last 48 hours, only to finally get this email:

A year of communities, connections and people that I got to know in the NFT and Crypto space are now inaccessible to me. This is where the power of centralisation and what it could mean became way more apparent to me. Even though, in this case, I didn’t get rugged because of my views or my opinions but due to a technical error in code.

But several people all over the globe have had their social accounts suspended because their views didn’t sit well with governments in power. This is madness, this is a direct infringement on civil rights.

"Twitter is the digital town square, where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated" - Elon Musk

Social interaction over the internet will soon be classified as a public good and will need to be treated as being of vital importance to free speech.

We can not and should not allow private, profit-motivated entities to control and affect speech on the internet.

In my case, technically, I did not get ‘deplatformed’. I can go ahead, make a new account and try to get back on the horse, however, thousands, if not millions of people are censored everyday and to feel how they felt even for the 48 hours that I did is absolutely debilitating.

The fight for an open and decentralised internet and metaverse now continues with even more vigour.

I’m commemorating this moment with this token:

You can join me in this fight for an Open Metaverse here.