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Journalist says he finds it ‘surreal’ to have account on X suspended after writing critique of platform

The author’s account had over 100,000 followers and was around 14 years old, he said

Journalist and author Séamas O’Reilly has said he finds it “very, very funny” that his account on X, formerly Twitter, was suspended just hours after he posted about an article he wrote for the Irish Examiner in which he said the platform was unusable due to bots. In the Examiner article, O’Reilly made reference to a “scam bot [that] had a blue check mark, meaning that, unlike me, it pays money every month to Elon Musk’s vastly indebted and unprofitable platform, a situation which would greatly disincentive his company taking proactive measures to weed them out”. O’Reilly said if he did not get his account back it would be “personally, quite annoying but professionally quite depressing” as Twitter was his route into his current profession as a journalist and author.

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