Why @crabcrawler1 was banned. I want it back.
A public appeal. I made a mistake in early 2023 that X has decided that I still need to be punished for.
(Note: even after publishing this I might find additional details worth adding. So check back from time to time to see if I updated this.)
Call to action: Reply to this Ella Irwin tweet or these tweets from ALX and say that I deserve to come back to the platform. Public advocacy makes all the difference with how Musk’s “X” has elected to decide matters of reinstatement.
Consider this Substack post a message in a bottle that I hope reaches you. I’m heartbroken that I still have to deal with crabcrawler1/nickmon1112 being banned on X. Every day is lost time. Every day. On top of that we’re in a case where Elon Musk claims to be open for free speech.
I certainly want some of that.
HIT THE SHARE BUTTON. POST THIS ARTICLE ON X. IT HELPS.
If you saw my appearances in both the ABC and BBC documentaries dedicated to Andrew Tate, thank you. It took a lot of work to make that into reality.
Unfortunately, X refuses to recognize my journalistic efforts as they continue to keep nickmon1112 and crabcrawler1 banned from the platform.
Here are my segments from both documentaries I was in.
I want to come back on X and follow interesting stories. I got great tipoffs all the time from my community. That’s what I miss doing.
Short ADHD version: Tate fans initially got me banned in March 2023, I was reinstated. But during that time, I freaked out and made drunken empty threats against former Tucker Carlson producer Gregg Re. After I was reinstated in April 2023, Gregg complained to then Trust & Safety Lead Ella Irwin about what happened. Ella rebanned me. Later, Ella Irwin quit, leaving me in indefinite limbo.
I reached out to Gregg and apologized last year. We made amends. I will once again publicly apologize to him. I deserved to be punished for what I said.
My argument is about how X’s indefinite punishment has gone on for far too long. It is the only thing keeping me banned on X. Even Gregg is fine with me coming back, but the platform is dragging their feet.
This is evident through the public lobbying done by X advocate ALX. First in May. Then again in July.
(My first thought was “thank fuck.” I’ve finally gotten acknowledged.)
I’ve spent several weeks and months waiting for ALX to come through.
Several other names listed by him were reinstated. But like being picked last for kickball, I have yet to see nickmon1112 be restored. It was painful getting my hopes up. I even got to see my old profile show up again when people tried typing it out.
In my opinion, it’s an indication of relevancy that’s enough for X’s systems to fetch my old profile. It made me hopeful that X was restoring my account’s data before formally restoring it to the platform.
I’ve had multiple people reach out to ALX regarding his efforts to try and get me reinstated. The consensus is that he was “working on it” and that the process was harder than it looks.
If we work off the notion that I’d only be reinstated if people “wanted” me back? I’d meet that standard. Here are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 examples of people asking nickmon1112/crabcrawler1 be reinstated to X.
I thought the best course of action would be speeding things along and holding myself accountable. This led me to sit down and do an interview with a friend of mine.
(I want to get this out of the way. Throughout this write-up I will be tempted to compare my plight to other online figures caught in their own controversies. So humor me this one time as I thank God Almighty that I didn’t end up like Boogie2988, who at the time of writing is seen picking up trash alongside the highway as a form of online penance after lying about having cancer.)
(Amen!)
It took me this long to publicly talk about it because I was too embarrassed. Simple as that. A bunch of crap was going on in 2023. I had to prioritize finishing my work on the ABC/BBC Tate projects before I could even think of addressing why crabcrawler got suspended.
When the Tate stuff was kicking off in early 2023, my cousin suddenly died at his own hands. It devastated me and my family. As that happened, I had taken on too much of a task trying to address the issue of Andrew Tate’s “war room” chat logs. Alongside trying to cope with this huge personal loss, I leaned too much into the booze.
March 10th
I still remember what I was doing the moment I got banned. Before it got hazy from the IPAs. I was watching the Friday Night Tights episode with Gavin McInnes while playing Hogwarts Legacy. (There’s some weird irony about how Gavin finds himself in the same indefinite hell as me when it comes to X, but I won’t waste time speculating on that).
I’d occasionally tab out to look at Twitter/X and notice I couldn’t anymore.
"Account was suspended after a fairly extensive investigation. We can’t comment in any detail on legal / criminal cases but the account has violated multiple privacy rules repeatedly and across multiple accounts."
This statement from Ella Irwin misled people into thinking I was involved in some sort of criminal wrongdoing. It was irresponsible for her to make this claim in the position she held. At the time of March 10th I wasn’t facing legal or criminal charges of any kind. Ella Irwin’s assertion to the contrary is completely false.
But it was enough for Gregg to call me a ban evading psychopath. I assumed the worst out of it. I previously got to know Gregg during my time at The Post Millennial. We had enough of a background that I had no problem with calling out Tucker’s admiration of the Tate brothers to him . But eventually that soured and he blocked me. (This was in late 2022).
Fast forward to early 2023, and it became evident that Gregg at the very least assumed the worst of my initial ban from X, believing I was some kind of criminal because of the smear campaign launched by allies of the Tate brothers.
That led me to what I said to Gregg Re after I was banned. I wrongly thought he was among the pro-Tate mob trying to get me deplatformed. I was led to believe he was apart of the crowd trying to attack me and my family. It caused me to lash out. I hate looking at it but there it is. Also I tried calling him a bunch that night. My bad.
(I posted Gregg’s phone number, and he posted mine. That don’t matter in the end though.)
I’m not proud of it. Even now I have a hard time adding the above images in because of the shame. I’m sharing them now because they’re the actual things that got me into this mess. I have to face and address it.
March 11th
A lot of people saw what I said to Gregg and were disappointed in me. Which is completely understandable. A few close friends even tried to call but I didn’t pick up. As soon as I woke up I realized what I wrote in my drunken stupor. I deleted it immediately and said I didn’t mean what I had written.
But even then I thought it was over. I had assumed that this was the final nail in the coffin immediately known to the people at X and there’d be no hope for me getting my account back. I had even made mention of what I said to Gregg in my appeal submissions to Twitter/X during this timeframe.
It was impossible for me to articulate the emotional turmoil I had been going through as it was happening. I hadn’t processed the mental burden for myself when it came to the extent of the Tate brothers story. To those people I’m completely sorry. Many counted on me in the past and didn’t expect to see things become such a wreck.
Andrew Tate was reinstated to X even though he had previously publicly threatened and targeted the family of a guy named Coltybrah. The Tate brothers ban-evaded much worse than I did. But Elon was fine with reinstating the two after he took over. Andrew Tate’s war room people even had guys show up to some random bloke’s house because the guy made comments about a war room member’s girlfriend.
March 29th
On March 29th reinstated me under their new criteria! Here’s the email! It seemed like a miracle. There was someone at the company who truly had enough faith in me to bring me back.
I addressed the Gregg situation even then. I knew what happened was wrong. A follower brought it up to me and I told them the truth. “What happened there was a mistake that I apologized for. Publicly and privately.”
This person accepted my statement as genuine. But apparently oopsie whoopsie someone at X made a mistake in bringing me back.
I don’t like the fact that my entire livelihood I worked years to build was classified as either an “error” or not. That’s incredibly demeaning to how much work went into crabcrawler1.
For Ella Irwin to label my reinstatement as a mistake would imply that the trust & safety team at X had full knowledge of my circumstances. Including the Gregg thing. Even though they’d later deny having known about it.
Imagine being initially banned, reinstated, and rebanned, like I was. I wouldn’t wish that feeling on anyone. I describe it as an emotional whiplash for a reason. I had cultivated a community of over 30,000 followers, and X’s staff were playing a game of hot potato in deciding whether or not to give it back to me.
After being rebanned I was only given generic violations of TOS. For a few weeks, anyway. As it so happened that X reinstated me again in mid-April.
April 13th
So on April 13th 2023 I was once more reinstated. If you read the contents of the email, the reference to “hate” can be traced back to Tate’s fans flagging down old tweets of mine, while the references to posting private information can be traced back to a debate I had with Tate’s ally Sartorial Shooter. He claimed during a Twitter space that he had no financial incentive with regards to defending the Tate brothers. I later proved otherwise via the shared business addresses Sartorial Shooter and the Tate brothers had had. That’s what dinged me for the “private information” assertion.
Feel free to read all the tweets I made during this timeframe. Notice how I didn’t do anything ridiculous.
I publicly vowed to do better going forward. But I wouldn’t be given that chance. Gregg decided to reply to a completely unrelated tweet. He felt it was wrong for X to reinstate me after the things I had said on Telegram.
Ella responded by saying:
“Please DM me anything that directly connects the messages in your screenshot to the user. We don’t have that information on our end and can’t take action based on a photo of texts. The user was not suspended for violent threats originally. That would be a perm suspension.”
Gregg deleted his claims later. But here’s a saved copy. The FBI frowns on people who make declarative statements in advance.
This is the point of the story where I could’ve lied and denied everything Gregg was saying. I could’ve bullshitted to save my own ass. But I’m a moron and I told Ella Irwin the truth. I was in a “dark place” and I said things to Gregg Re that I shouldn’t have.
"I saw these and appreciate the user taking public responsibility for his actions, including admitting his work may have put him a "dark place". We still can't allow violent threats and given the information I received today, the user definitely crossed the line."
My mistake was thinking X rewarded honesty. They don’t. At least not for me.
Gregg made good on his promise of calling the FBI on me. It was a real Mulder-and-Scully pairing that greeted me. They sat me down in their car to talk. I literally told them everything to the best of my ability. They had done their research on me online beforehand, there was nothing for me to hide. They’re the FBI after all, what’s the point?
Fortunately, the FBI were completely understanding in my explanation about the Gregg situation. I explained how the Tate brothers had a vicious army of underaged fans attacking me on a daily basis. When I played them audio from one of the war room member meet-ups, they naturally likened Iggy Semmelweis to having the tone of a cult leader.
I even asked the feds if they could put in a good word to X to get me my account back. Sadly they’re not allowed to do that sort of thing.
But to the people who falsely believe I’m some sort of criminal, they’re mistaken. I had the FBI at my house. They knew all about my online activity and saw through those baseless claims. They were made by Tate’s people as an attempt to smear me.
May 2023
By late May 2023, I lost my ability to appeal on X. Even though there’s no way whatsoever that anyone knew the email address associated with crabcrawler1, I began to receive emails from X asserting that I submitted new appeal requests.
Even though I did not. I replied to several of these emails saying that I did not submit these requests. The extent of which amounted to a few dozen over a week or two, before the situation seemed to resolve itself…. and amounted to shutting off my ability to appeal for crabcrawler1’s reinstatement entirely.
I have no clue how it happened. It fuels my concerns that there were shady actions on X’s part meant to keep me from coming back to the platform. I have never seen a situation like this where everything with the appeals system goes on the fritz.
I don’t even have the opportunity for Twitter/X to tell me no.
I considered the glitch on Twitter/X’s appeal system as enough reason to reach out to Gregg and make amends with him. We had a good 20-minute phone call where we both explained our sides and came to an understanding. He had gotten worried about things based on what I had originally said, and it was on me to address it and clear the air. It’s outrageous that I’m in a purgatory where Gregg Re, the guy I wronged in the first place, is willing to forgive me and have me back on. But X isn’t.
There’s one big reason for that.
Onward
At the beginning of June 2023, Ella Irwin stepped down as X’s Trust & Safety lead. She had gotten in hot water for making the call to limit the visibility of Matt Walsh’s “What is a Woman?” documentary after he tried posting the full thing to X for some kind of promo bit.
Ella Irwin was the one who oversaw my ban. But then she stepped down. So I’m left with the conclusion that the remaining trust & safety staff are simply following Ella’s instructions even though she’s gone.
That’s the indefinite loop I’ve been put into.
I even had someone recently reach out to X to get the 10-4 on why crabcrawler1 was still banned. As of early 2024, staffers there said I was guilty of “violent speech.”
Let me reiterate about how the chain of communications had broken down. I can’t even submit appeals for either @nickmon1112 or @crabcrawler1 anymore. Twitter/X shut off my ability to do that. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve had to go public for my case.
Back in July, Elon Musk claimed that things said by a guy named Lucas Gage amounted to six months suspension. “Repeated and clear calls for violence.” Even if we applied what I said to Gregg under that standard, despite the FBI clearing me, I should’ve been allowed back a long time ago. We are currently on the SIXTEENTH month of crabcrawler1 being banned.
Many people aren’t mentally cognizant these days. Have you been out there? Outside? It’s a mad house. Oftentimes at work I have to help old people work the credit card machine. But it’s not just the old folks too. There are younger people who aren’t senior citizens who should know better. But they’ve seemingly given up hope and/or resigned themselves to a lifetime of inadequacy. For one reason or another they’ve given up.
Every time I read statements from Elon Musk about free speech it feels like taking crazy pills. Here’s seven statements from the X CEO that are ironic given my continued banishment from the platform.
(1:29 PM · Feb 18, 2023) “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. It is a fundamental defense against autocracy & statism, which is why we must fight so hard to preserve it. The founders showed great wisdom, based on painful historical lessons, in passing the First Amendment.”
(10:11 PM · May 15, 2023) “We’ve pushed harder for free speech than any other Internet company, including Wokipedia @jimmy_wales”
(2:34 AM · Jan 11, 2024) “As promised, this platform will fight for your freedom to speak! We expect many such battles in the future. Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. Without it, America ends.”
(12:23 PM · Feb 16, 2024) “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. That’s why it’s the FIRST Amendment. Without free speech, all is lost.”
(9:55 AM · Mar 21, 2024) “This platform was previously extremely biased, amplifying the left and suppressing the right. Now both are free to speak. No voice on the left has been suppressed to the best of my knowledge.”
(12:49 PM · Apr 18, 2024) “Given the relentless attacks on free speech, I am going to fund a national signature campaign in support of the First Amendment”
(7:46 AM · Aug 10, 2024) “Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. If the truth is suppressed, it is impossible to make an informed voting decision. The degree to which freedom of speech is being undermined around the world is extremely alarming.”
“Indeed,” Elon said to an X staffer who promised all voices are welcome on the platform. Every voice but mine.
Tommy Robinson fled the UK but he’s still allowed to be on X. I lean on the side of free speech. Yet if the supposed line is drawn at so-called “criminal activity,” you’d think Tommy would’ve met that standard by now. The UK wants his head on a plate.
All I ask from X is the same leniency they’ve shown people like Milo Yiannopoulos, who was banned many many years ago. All I want is the same compassion that the platform has shown people like Nick Fuentes.
Despite the obvious reality about how polarized his portion of the right-wing is in current discourse? Tommy, Milo, and Fuentes all came back and they’re all doing fine. The world didn’t end because they have their accounts back.
Same goes for me.
I don’t even think the Tates deserve to be deplatformed on X. Despite everything that happened with this story I agree to the need for free speech. And when instances of illegality come up, those should be individually addressed per the situation without fully silencing voices.
Elon Musk didn’t even want to bring Alex Jones back to the platform yet he eventually caved after enough people demanded his reinstatement. It set a new norm of what was expected before previously banned personalities were allowed to come back.
I am not a criminal. To this day I can say with confidence that the only thing on my track record is a speeding ticket. Even then I went 40 MPH in a 25 MPH zone so it’s not like I was street racing.
Despite all the pushback I’ve received from X thus far, I’m still an enthusiast of the platform. There’s no other way to easily and directly communicate with others online without unnecessary obstacles and hoops. Twitter/X’s appeal is that they figured out how to circumvent that from the get-go.
The appeal of X is being able to tell anyone in the world what you want at any given time. But I can't. Even at this crucial election year for America where there's an endless stream of stories coming in from the campaign trail.
@nickmon1112 has been banned (over five years) for longer than it even existed (three-and-a-half years). There’s absolutely no excuse for that. If there were a known justification as to why the former staff at Twitter banned that account in May 2019, I’d present that to you now. All I remember is how at that time I was talking about a study done by Eoin Lenihan that linked Antifa figures to left-wing journalists. To the best of my knowledge, something could’ve been spun up about that. Back then, Twitter’s former management were highly biased toward left-wing academia who were chasing down so-called right-wing extremism.
All I want is my community back. All I want to do is be myself on the platform again. All I want to do is dig into stories and have fun hanging out with my fans from around the world.
@nickmon1112 had 47,900 followers while @crabcrawler1 had 35,000. I had legitimate communities that were apart of the discourse. When it came to current events, especially mass shootings, I presented things as they became known. Every so often, previously shared posts became debunked, but ultimately I saw the need to bring cohesion to stories as soon as possible.
People loved and appreciated it. Before my wings were clipped in my prime, I was on a local news station talking about the Jussie Smollett story. My Twitter thread on the New Zealand shooting in early 2019 was broadcasted because I was one of the only people who really had all the facts.
In closing, I’m oftentimes too tired from my day job at a liquor store to have time to try and do anything with this online stuff. I’m working on fixing that as best I can.
To the people who subscribed here to hear me talk more about the case with the Tate brothers. I’ll agree to try and make a part IV of my series that goes over the litigation games Andrew and Tristan have partaken in over the past year.
I made this post because there are people still out there who believe in the causes I stood for, and believe I should come back to X. I won’t let them down.