Welcome to SimonTV.org

Elon Musk Discourages Citizen Journalism on the 𝕏 Platform. So I migrated.

Welcome to the new SimonTV!

𝕏’s new rules discriminate against small citizen photojournalists such as myself offering hyper-local news content, so I spent a few hours and a couple of hundred dollars this morning setting up an alternative.

Like many creators I’ll still be posting snippets to 𝕏 but the long form articles and videos will be here. My apologies for the inconvenience of the extra click you’ll have to make to consume the material I create. I took this decision knowing full well it will cost me audience on 𝕏 where most of my audience resides.

But hey, it’s not like I was getting paid anyway. Mr. Musk’s new rules almost guarantee a small creator in a small country such as myself can never monetise on his platform. Being relegated to just a feeder of content to larger accounts to profit from is to my mind, unfair.

You’ll still be able to join my livestreams on 𝕏 and interact with me there but the juicy content will be here, at the cost to you of an extra click to consume it.

My apologies for the inconvenience. In the long run my hope and expectation is this will be better.

Though I’ve personally now deprioritised 𝕏 it is still a great platform with solid commitments to free speech and censorship, and I encourage everyone to keep using it. In the days ahead I’ll publish a guide for other creators seeking also to leverage 𝕏 onto more creator-friendly platforms.

-SRA. Auckland, 7/xi 2024.