Why Apples of Gold Jewelry Dumped Twitter
Apples of Gold Jewelry scrubbed all social media links related to Twitter from our website. While we continue to have accounts at Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn and see moderate activity there, our Facebook account, while active, appears to be dead, and our Twitter account has been permanently banned, twice! As a result, we’ve removed all references to Twitter from our website. As fierce free speech advocates, we made this decision, in major part, as a protest against Big Tech censorship, bias and misplaced authoritarianism.
As a business, we cannot spend our time, resources and energy on relentlessly building our business accounts at major social media companies only to be inexplicably banned because Twitter or Facebook didn’t like or agree with what we had to say, especially concerning politics. On Twitter, we had reached a milestone of 10,000 followers before being permanently banned, again. Before that, we had spent years accumulating over 25,000 followers on our older account, before also being banned. On Facebook, we currently have over 100,000 followers but the algorithm is so biased towards paid advertising that we get few likes, comments and shares, making all efforts virtually fruitless. The immense amount of effort and time to build a serious following only to be banned makes no business sense, and so we decided to dump social media from our own website, while maintaining Pinterest and Instagram (for now) offsite, along with any social media sites who haven’t banned us inexplicably.
The alternatives are also mostly boring and very limited with poor UIs, such as GETTR, GAB, Parler, etc. With limited amounts of the population on the alternative platforms, it does not make for good, honest interaction outside of your inner circles. GETTR, in fact, surprisingly, also banned our company account permanently, citing that we used their platform to promote our products. Way to go alienating a future advertiser, GETTR! At least Twitter has an excellent UI and seamless, intuitive functionality, which is why it continues to be so popular despite its inherent biases and totalitarian politics and ideology.
Twitter, however, appears to be the worst of all the social media sites when it comes to censorship and playing politics. Which other social media site has been a sitting president of the United States? That’s right, that was Twitter. The last tweet we posted was, “God bless President Trump.” We were banned permanently within 12 hours of this post, without warning and without explanation. Was this the harmless post that caused Twitter to ban us permanently? We don’t know. We were banned without warning or explanation. We were simply informed that we had broken their “Communist Standards”, err, I mean, their “community standards”.
Social media in America and the world has become one big totalitarian, fascist, anti-free speech platform where only posts that succumb to mainstream narratives are accepted and encouraged, often purely on the Left of the political spectrum. Everyone else, tread lightly! You never know when you may be permanently banned, PERMANENTLY. Not a 30-Day warning, but banned forever without recourse, with other usernames, emails and IP addresses somehow linked to previous accounts. We even tried using a VPN to mask our IP and used a different email address to re-sign up, but Twitter somehow linked our new accounts to our old and banned us again, and again, and again. As such, we are done with Twitter and their electronic fascism.
The only social media site that has been somewhat effective as a free tool for our business has been Pinterest, where we get a lot of activity and repins, while politics seems to be largely absent from the platform overall, as we focus on our jewelry products. The disadvantage to Pinterest is that it is unlikely many of our posts are turning into sales. It appears that traditional online marketing from search engines and paid ads appear to be working best, along with repeat customer acquisition and word of mouth. Therefore, we have dumped all social medial platforms from our own website, for now (will this ban be permanent? We shall see). And, we think, our site looks much better and cleaner now. Our website looks less cluttered and less busy without the Big Tech logos distracting from our own products and we literally feel like a dark weight has been lifted, because we no longer display these Big Tech names in association with our own brand.
Facebook and Twitter are as unAmerican as it gets with their totalitarian control, censorship, political interference in elections, and constantly trying to tell free citizens with God-given rights what we can and cannot say, not to mention the insanity and incongruity of their so-called “fact checkers” with their biased opinions and misleading articles.
If all social media suddenly disappeared while the rest of society as a whole remained intact, I believe America and the world would be better for it. I remember before social media, how truly social society actually was. Now, we’re all glued to our screens. So Twitter and Fascistbook, we’ve had it up to here with you! We’d like to take this and opportunity—as a free-thinking, freedom loving, autonomous American brand—to tell you to fucking GO TO HELL, you dirty, filthy rotten, Commie bastards! You have been banned, from our platform, PERMANENTLY.
Sincerely,