What really happened to Politics For All

On 2 January I woke up late to the sound of my phone buzzing continuously and a sense that something had gone badly wrong. The first message was from a friend. ‘Having a nice holiday?’ he wrote, above a screenshot of my political Twitter account covered in block letters: ‘Suspended.’ My reaction was to swear in just the way my dad does whenever he crashes his car.

Politics For All was a news aggregation service I started two years ago when I was 17. It took the most salient lines from news articles and posted them across social media, always pointing readers to the original publication. The aim was to engage a younger audience in politics by summarising stories in a more accessible way. It worked, amassing nearly 500,000 followers in around two years, 400,000 of those in the past eight months.

What started out as a hobby, born of my own interest in politics, ended up as a major Twitter account followed by hundreds of MPs, many cabinet ministers (including the Chancellor) and even the Prime Minister’s wife (more on her later).