Ali - An Obituary for a Twitter Account

 Ali has died.

PoliticsForAlI was a news aggregation service (or a “news aggression service” according to one quick-thinker in the aftermath). The Twitter account, which had hundreds of thousands of followers, had subscriptions to all of the newspapers and would bring the most outrageous of paywalled content to the masses in 280 characters or less, always linking to the story below. Unfortunately, the 280 character summary of the point made in an article became further and further removed from what the article actually said, and by the end of 2021 they had largely stopped linking the articles from which their “news” came from altogether. Why was he called Ali as a nickname? Well, paste their Twitter handle into a case changer and you will see - the last L on “all” is not an L but an uppercase I.

I do not need to tell you this. The chances are that if you are here you are familiar with Ali and had your own serious misgivings about it. One incident that sticks out in my mind the most is the Liverpool attack in late 2021, when it was reported that one person had died, and politicians rushed to offer sympathy to the family of the deceased, then it emerged that the dead person was the attacker. PoliticsForAll tweeted things like “Shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth offers sympathy to the family of a dead TERRORIST” accompanied by their usual fanfare of ridiculous siren emojis and the word “BREAKING” in faux-foreboding capital letters. Obviously a deliberate twisting of the truth to make Labour politicians look like sympathisers for terrorism, but more than that it is surely extremely callous to the family of the terrorist. I understand this is not a commonly held view, but even if the terrorist got what was coming to him, surely we cannot fail to have sympathy for a mother who has lost a son - even if said son did something awful. Well according to Ali and his many fans, we can fail to have sympathy for a mother who has lost a son, and also every other wing of society.

I haven’t before seen scenes on the Twitter timeline like the day Ali got suspended - not at the start of first lockdown, not over the Barnard Castle eye test, not even through the Boris Christmas Parties fiasco. This was unprecedented, because for the first time in a long time, most of political twitter was celebrating, and we continued to celebrate through the spectacular fallout.

It was unclear at first why Ali was suspended. Had it been the fake news, the harassment, the (allegedly) illegal gambling advertisements, or something else? Speculation on this front only ramped up as people who used to be associated with the now suspended twitter account came out with information. Many former disgruntled “staff” complaining of low pay and being treated badly by account founder Nick Moar, along with the success of staff being based entirely on engagement, so staff could come under fire if they happened to be working on a slow news day. One former admin released a statement saying that they had been unfairly dismissed for being unable to write correctly - the statement was littered with spelling and grammar mistakes. Then it emerged that a few days before it was suspended, Mr. Moar had been offered more than £1million for PoliticsForAlI, and had turned it down because of “impartiality”.

What impartiality, sir?

Maybe Mr. Moar is already very rich. Maybe he is very stupid. In the end, all we know for sure is that PoliticsForAlI got suspended permanently for manipulating the twitter algorithm by using their alternate accounts, including NewsForAll and CryptoForAll to retweet stuff from PoliticsForAlI. Which seems like an extremely tenuous reason for suspension, given that BBC News retweets BBC Politics all the time, and that is quite obviously not a break of the Twitter rules. Almost like someone is trying to avoid coming clean about the real reason for suspension.

“Almost like” because I do not fancy being sued for libel.