A certified red teamer. A published researcher. A ghost.
For six months I published red team research on X.
Adversarial simulation frameworks.
Proof-of-concepts.
Write-ups that took days to validate and document.
The kind of work you don't whip up in an afternoon. The kind you triple-check because you know the community will scrutinize every line.
The result?
Eight followers.
Zero traction.
Complete, absolute silence.
I Thought It Was Me
I told myself the problem was me.
Maybe I didn't understand social media. Maybe my content wasn't "engaging" enough. Maybe I was too technical, too niche, too boring for the algorithm.
So I tried harder.
More posts. More hashtags. Tagging people. Following trends. Adjusting my tone. Rewriting hooks. Studying what "worked" for others.
Nothing changed.
The silence stayed. The void stayed. And I kept feeding it, post after post, thinking this one would break through.
It never did.
Then I Found Out Why
A friend mentioned a third-party tool that checks if your account is shadowbanned. I ran it out of curiosity. Expected a green checkmark.
Got this instead:
Ghost Ban detected.
Your posts are visible only to you.
Your replies are hidden from other users.
Your account appears normal to you, but is invisible to the community.
I stared at the screen for a solid minute.
Six months.
Hundreds of hours of research.
Dozens of posts.
All of it — literally invisible.
Nobody saw my work. Nobody could reply. Nobody even knew I existed.
The algorithm had decided I was a bot. Why? Because I was a new account. Because I used a VPN — because X is blocked in my country and I have no other way to access it. Because I linked to GitHub repositories instead of staying inside the platform's walled garden.
New account + VPN + external links = bot in the eyes of X's 2026 algorithm.
So it threw me into an invisible prison without a word.
No Warning. No Appeal. Just Deception.
Here is what makes me genuinely angry:
This isn't moderation.
This isn't "protecting the community."
This is deception.
I would have preferred an honest message. Something like:
"Your account is restricted because your IP is from a commercial VPN pool. Here's what you can do."
At least then I'd know. I could fix it. I could adapt. I could make an informed choice — stay and fight, or leave and focus my energy elsewhere.
But X chose silence.
It let me keep producing. Keep engaging. Keep believing I was part of a global security community. For months. While nobody could hear a single word.
The platform gave me the illusion of participation while denying me the reality of it.
That is not a bug. That is a design choice.
The Professional Cost
Let me be clear about what this means for someone in my field.
I am a certified offensive security professional. I run a red team lab. I build frameworks. I publish research so that defenders can understand what attackers are actually capable of.
For a security researcher, invisibility is a professional death sentence.
Your work doesn't exist if no one can see it.
Your findings don't matter if no one can read them.
Your contributions to the community are erased — not because they lack value, but because an algorithm decided you don't deserve an audience.
I wasn't spamming. I wasn't trolling. I wasn't violating any policy that anyone could point to.
I was simply from the wrong country and using the wrong IP address.
That was my crime.
Why I Left
I didn't leave because of Elon Musk's politics.
I didn't leave because of some ideological disagreement.
I didn't leave because "Twitter isn't what it used to be."
I left because a platform that calls itself a "town square" has built a system that silently eliminates professionals from censored countries.
No appeal.
No transparency.
No human review.
Just algorithmic disappearance.
If you live in a country where X is freely accessible, you might never experience this. You might think shadowbanning is a conspiracy theory or an edge case.
It isn't. It is a systemic feature that disproportionately affects people who already face the highest barriers to participation — those under sanctions, censorship, and digital exclusion.
And the cruelest part? You don't even know it's happening to you.
Where I Am Now
I moved to Bluesky.
Here, the feed is chronological. My posts reach the people who follow me. No algorithm decides whether I deserve visibility.
Here, using a VPN isn't a punishable offense. It isn't even a flag. It's just how some people connect.
Here, it's built on a protocol — not owned by one person who can wake up tomorrow and decide you're a bot, a threat, or simply inconvenient.
Here, I exist.
To the Infosec Community
If you're in cybersecurity and you've thought about leaving X — what was your final straw?
Was it the algorithm hiding your technical threads?
Was it the toxicity drowning out professional discourse?
Was it the realization that the platform values engagement over expertise?
Or are you still holding on? Still hoping that if you just optimize hard enough, the algorithm will finally notice you?
I held on for six months.
I optimized. I adjusted. I believed.
And all the while, I was screaming into a void that was designed to look like a room full of people.
Never again.
Find me on Bluesky: @toxy4ny.bsky.social
My red team research: github.com/toxy4ny
This lab: hackteam.RED
The author is a certified offensive security professional and the maintainer of the redteam-ai-benchmark open-source framework. Views are personal and do not represent any employer or client.
Top comments (4)
Hey brother,
Thank you for this.
Honestly, it's one of the most thought-provoking pieces I've read in a long while.
To the certified red teamer, the published researcher,the mysterious figure behind these words: when the time is right, let this reach you.
Lately I've been seeing security come up more and more,in communities and inside companies.
Yet it's nearly always after something has already broken.Same as the law: we move only once the damage is done.People really don't change, do they?
I've taken a few "freeze beams" to my own X account as well, so this one struck rather close to home.
Perhaps people like you and me, and the rest of the security crowd, were simply a touch too stimulating for X's taste.Some signals, it seems, the algorithm would rather not read.
I'm genuinely glad our paths crossed.Finding you here on DEV, and getting to communicate even through the occasional reaction, is something I count myself lucky for. Even brushing past one another in this space has sharpened my career and raised the resolution at which I see things.
Knowing there's someone kind, and quietly proud enough,to keep writing words like these means more to me than I can easily put down. It rekindles something stubborn in me, the part that refuses to break. So let me say it plainly, even if it's a little embarrassing: a great deal of gratitude, of respect, and of love. From here.
For me it was less about leaving than about drawing a line. In my country, X leans heavily towards being a space for conversation, so I decided to lean into precisely that and keep it for communication. The denser material, the things that need links and depth, I bring here, or elsewhere. A division of labour that finally let me make my peace with the platform.
Being mutuals with you here has brought me no end of good. Thank you for that, brother.
P.S. Engineers in security burn out at a frightening rate, you know. So let's look after ourselves, and each other, and carry on living well, you and I both.
And give my regards to the ghost, the one who went and lived the part for real. Welcome back to the visible world, brother. lol
Akari,
Thank you for this. Seriously.
I wrote that article thinking I was documenting a technical failure - a platform's algorithm misfiring. But reading your words, I realized I was documenting something else entirely: loneliness. The loneliness of producing work you believe in, sending it into what you think is a room full of peers, and slowly discovering you've been talking to a mirror for six months.
Your "freeze beams" - I'm stealing that. It's perfect. Because that's exactly what it feels like: not a ban, not a punishment, just a cold, silent pause that never ends. And the worst part is you don't even feel the cold until someone else points out you've been frozen.
"Even brushing past one another in this space has sharpened my career."
This hit me hard. Because while I was a ghost, I had no idea I was brushing past anyone. I thought I was alone in the dark. Knowing that my work reached you even when the platform told me it reached no one - that rewrites the whole story. It doesn't make the ban less real, but it makes the invisibility less absolute. Thank you for telling me this.
Your division of labour is wise. Keeping X for conversation, bringing the dense material to places that respect it - that's not compromise, that's strategy. I might adopt something similar, though honestly, after the ghosting, I'm reluctant to give X even that much of my time. But your approach is pragmatic, and I respect pragmatism in our field. We need more of it.
"Engineers in security burn out at a frightening rate."
Yes. We do. And we pretend we don't. We talk about resilience and grind and "the mission," but we rarely admit that the mission doesn't care if we break. So your proposal - to look after ourselves and each other - I'll take that seriously. Consider this my acceptance of the pact. If you ever feel the freeze closing in, or the weight of the work getting too loud, you have someone here who understands exactly what that silence feels like.
And thank you for welcoming me back to the visible world. I didn't expect to find kindred spirits so quickly after escaping the sandbox. But here you are, proving that the communities we actually need are the ones built on protocols, not on one man's algorithm.
Let's keep each other visible, Akari. And let's keep each other human.
With respect, gratitude, and solidarity -
toxy4ny
I can relate lol. I had a similar problem with my github. Honestly shadowbanning should never have existed.
Mirrai,
Same here. And yeah - GitHub, X, doesn't matter which platform. The mechanism is identical: algorithm decides you're noise, and you're gone. No appeal, no explanation, just silence.
"Shadowbanning should never have existed."
Hard agree. It's not moderation. It's cowardice. A platform that can't look you in the eye and say "we're limiting you" has no right to host communities.
Your profile says you break things to understand them. Same. And it's ironic - we build tools to expose systems, but the systems that host us refuse to be exposed. No CVE for "platform silently ghosts its own users."
Good to know you're here. Let's keep breaking things - and documenting what breaks us.