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). Sensing a demand for more accessible news, I built a small team of young people and we created offshoot accounts in football and more general news. We picked up an extra 300,000 followers on those within a few months.

During our final month, our tweets were seen nearly a billion times. I believe if we had not been shut down, this time next year we would have had more than five million followers across our network, overtaking any newspaper in Britain.

Then, at the start of this month, Twitter permanently suspended the ‘For All’ profiles on their platform. All that work, destroyed overnight. We were given no warnings, and no real explanation, just an automated email explicitly telling us not to reply.