Séamas O'Reilly: A special kind of madness that descends when you're the main character

'I might as well give a final update and leave the whole sorry mess behind me.' Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

It’s a pretty solid rule of professional writing that if you ever become a news story yourself, it behoves you to comment on it. 

The events of the past two weeks, therefore, require me to engage, one last time, in a situation that was, like so many things in the world of Big Tech, both extremely strange and quite boring. 

Some would be daunted at having to make such a thing seem interesting, but I cut my teeth writing about Northern Irish politics, so such tasks are familiar territory.

I don’t expect anyone to be interested in this for any longer than the final full stop at the end of this piece, but I also didn’t expect anyone to be interested in it in the first place, so I might as well give a final update and leave the whole sorry mess behind me.

Last Friday I was reinstated to X (formerly known as Twitter) after a suspension which followed my criticising that platform in these very pages. 

The whole ordeal has been very odd. There is a special kind of madness that descends when you find yourself a main character in the story you’ve just been covering.

Reading about my own case in this paper, the Irish Times, Irish Independent, RTÉ, and American sites like Boing Boing and Tech Dirt — not to mention hearing about it on Radio 1 and Newstalk — was quite surreal, not least because I was frequently referred to as a tech reporter. 

I am not primarily, or even tangentially, a tech reporter, and it felt a little like a case of stolen valour to be so described. 

I read a lot of tech reporting and have incredible respect for what those people do, and the discipline and fastidiousness with which they approach a full-time gig that I would sooner eat a grenade than pursue myself. 

So it was heartening to have so many steadfast, committed and dogged journalists in that field raising questions about my case.

One reason why they might have been so eager to do so, of course, was that what happened to me could happen to them, and much more readily. At this point, I should probably theorise about what exactly did happen, so here goes.

Following my suspension for “platform manipulation and spam”, I was cut off for six days, with no follow-up given at any point to me, or any of the above-mentioned outlets when they inquired into my case, or whether it was connected to my having written a piece for the Examiner about platform manipulation and spam. 

My account was only reinstated when a prominent UK-based journalist was able to get in touch with a human operative at X. Picture: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire

All who did this received the same curt, automated response, “Busy now, please check back later”, which read like Ernest Hemingway had been tasked with boring, rather than depressing, a reader with just six words.

My account was only reinstated when a prominent UK-based journalist was able to get in touch with a human operative at X, and my use of “when” here is literal: 30 seconds after said journalist hung up the phone with a promise to call his X contact, I received an email from the platform saying the suspension had been lifted.

In this email, all previous charges of platform manipulation and spam had mysteriously disappeared, and I was told I’d been suspended because I’d been “sending multiple unsolicited @ replies or mentions”.

Let’s put aside the fact that this was directly contrary to their original stated reasoning, and examine it on its own terms. 

A quick glance through my replies in the time before my suspension reveals what I’d presumed: I’d posted five or six replies in the preceding 48 hours, all of which were pleasant and normal, and all to people I either knew, or who’d reached out to me in the first place.

While I would like to consider myself so important that X placed a scarlet letter beside my name themselves out of pure spite, the most likely explanation is that I was mass reported by the self-same bot farmers I was criticising. 

The question is simply whether the length of my suspension, the lack of response from the platform afterward, and the wildly contradictory reasons finally given for it on reinstatement — was due to incompetence, malice or some strange mixture of both.

So, I still don’t know why I was suspended, but I do know I only got my account reinstated because of a chance acquaintance with a very well-connected British tech reporter, who managed to do something that the combined mass of the Irish media had not: speak to a human being.

Put this way, it’s easier to see why my case caught Irish tech journalists’ attention: this is a reality they have to deal with every day in covering the Irish-headquartered tech platform that still reigns supreme in all aspects of online news coverage in Ireland, and much of the western world.

While I was away, a report came out on US tech website Mashable that found that 75.85% of X’s much vaunted ad traffic during Superbowl weekend was due to bots. 

If that sounds like a lot, believe me, it is. 

“I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to 50%, not to mention 76%,” bot analyst Guy Tytunovich told Mashable reporter Matt Binder, “I’m amazed…I’ve never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close.” (To put that 76% into further perspective, the fake ad traffic found to be coming from rival platforms over the same period conveys the sheer scale of the disparity: TikTok: 2.6%, Facebook: 2%, Instagram: 0.7%).

Drowning in a sea of platform manipulation, and knowing that a great piece of tech reporting on the way putting this in cold hard numbers, I can imagine — hypothetically, of course — that an indebted and embattled social media platform might be proactive about shutting down any talk about spam or bots, and that a lowly opinion writer such as myself could hypothetically have been caught in the crossfire.

Urging such a theory would, of course, lapse into a level of conjecture unbefitting a tech reporter.

Good thing I’m not a tech reporter, I guess.