Asking Twitter’s CEO To Remove The Shackles From @tibettruth

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An Appeal From @tibettruth

Attention:
Jack Dorsey
CEO
Twitter

Jack,

We’ve had our Twitter account since 2009. During the years it has grown to become a powerful voice supporting human rights, justice and national freedom for the people of Tibet.

@tibettruth brings you facts, information that’s not censored or distorted to appease the Chinese regime. We provide uncompromising exposure of China’s vicious treatment of Tibet.

In addition to news, special reports and related information we also run and update a range of online actions that address human rights issues, challenge organizations that are deliberately silent on Tibet or actively appeasing the Chinese authorities.

Our digital activism has attracted support, encouragement and active solidarity from around the world, at one stage we had a community of nearly 13, 000 followers.

We had hoped to build upon that progression, with the objective of expanding outreach, bringing the issue of Tibet to an ever wider audience.

Such ambitions however curiously stalled some three years back, as we began to notice a halt to the total of folks foillowing the account. It was as if a throttle had been applied.

This was followed by a steady and consistent reduction in followers, despite our active presence and engagement across the social media platform.

Then came news in 2018 that Twitter was implementing a policy to remove fake accounts and address the bot problem, with people reporting a marked drop in followers.

Had our account been wrongly tangled up in that cull by Twitter’s algorithms? Well on a number of occasions we experienced a lockdown, claims that we we’re an automated account, or other assertions of violating policy. Each time these were overturned and apologies offered by Twitter.

Yet the reduction of followers continued, our tweets to @TwitterSupport on the issue ignored. At the time of this statement the total has fallen to 10, 290. Meanwhile we see that other Tibet related accounts are showing increased follower rates.

We do not believe this is down to the form or content of our Twitter engagement, nor do we consider that people don’t wish to subscribe to our account, or receive news and information on Tibet.

Having closely monitored this decline we regard @tibettruth has been unjustly targeted by Twitter as a rogue account, and penalized through a limitation of, and reduction upon our community of followers.

Whatever the reasons behind this, we are being denied the freedom to expand our account, prevented from reaching more followers. This has the effect of censorship. A consequence which must bring some twisted pleasure to the Chinese regime, that detests our online activism and reportage.

It’s our hope Jack that on considering this appeal you will be able to exert some influence to free up our account, stop the ongoing cull and so allow us to grow. If you support human rights, civil liberties and freedom-of-speech we trust you can assist and so enable our voice for Tibet to reach ever more people across Twitter.

Thanks for your patience in reading this.

@tibettuth

April 24, 2020