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The up side of being de-platformed

This morning’s batch of emails contained the now familiar (to me anyway):

“Ewe - tube” continue to gleefully go through what’s left of my channel, systematically being offended at content and removing videos one by one.

These are the same videos that we use to illustrate situations in workshops - different types of assault and context and they are labelled as such. I get these from news reports and twitter feeds etc.

Those that were already removed were for violating their policy on violent or graphic content, which was funny as many of them were from various news reports that were found on…YT without any problem or outrage.

What’s interesting is that one particular news report video was complained about and that happened the same day as our facebook page being locked. With several hundred followers (small I know…) I was only reaching about 12 people so they had been throttling the page for a while.

I sent an appeal and then…our instagram page was locked within about 24 hrs. Which has ZERO video content and just photos of training and logos etc.

So far…

Force Necessary facebook: Locked including messaging, then reopened but throttled and still no messaging.

Force Necessary instagram: Still locked. Can’t interact with it at all.

Force Necessary youtube: Multiple removals of content and now not used.

One In One instagram: Still up but now not being used as this platform (Substack) is so much more positive.

It’s important to understand that nearly 100% of any business that I’ve generated in the last 7 years has been from word of mouth or my website, a fact I’m pretty proud of.

I don’t advertise at all and social media accounts generated about one or two enquiries about actual training in that time. The rest was just endless “liking” and posting that did nothing.

Hint: if you really want to be popular on FB just post a picture of either Bruce Lee or a new “badass” looking training shirt - this would always get hits. I never saw any of those people at training though…

In short, I couldn’t be happier that I pissed instagoogletweetface off.

I now have a great group of positive students, Substack with it’s ability to have ACTUAL conversations with readers about self defence and even a book out, with two more in the works.

Thank you to the tireless commissars of social media for helping me raise the standards of MY community away from theirs.