All but the most visible, verified-by-default Democrats (and fellow travelers) on X spent the last election alongside the rest of the unverified users in X’s proverbial spam folder, mostly invisible to the rest of the platform but especially to people who didn’t already follow and want to hear from them. They might have been scrolling in a familiar-enough place. But they were posting into a void, living out a sort of mass shadowban of everyone who wasn’t willing to pay for a subscription. It wasn’t harrowing so much as strange and a little sad, with established users going through the motions, posting and sharing and waiting, propelled by years of habit, imagining audiences where they simply no longer existed.