Prior to COVID, I had a good thing going on Twitter. I’d post there four or five times a week about web design, SEO, or tech. There was a deluge of content constantly being published by big players in the space along with small businesses, so I always had something new and interesting to talk about and share with others.

But then COVID happened and everything changed.

The first big thing I noticed was the paywall pandemic. I used to spend an hour on Feedly every day, looking through my favorite publications in the different spaces I was writing about.

In 2020, though, so many of the sites I frequented put up a paywall. Did anyone else notice when that happened? And did anyone else notice that most of those sites never did away with their paywalls?

My response at the time wasn’t, “Okay, I get why they need the money.” After all, most of them were already littering their web pages with banner ads.

Instead, my response was:

“Fuck these guys. We’re all struggling right now.”

So I planned on throwing my weight behind smaller publications and businesses. The only problem was that many of these companies either stopped content production entirely or they published shit.

Within months, I gave up on social media marketing. There was nothing worthwhile to share or to discuss. Except COVID, of course.

How Business Insider Got Me to Speak Out Against the Narrative

Until the “pandemic” started, Twitter was the only form of marketing I was doing and it had served me well. I used it to boost my website’s ranking and public profile in the industry. I hadn’t needed to apply for a writing gig for a couple of years because Twitter was sending all kinds of prospective business my way.

Then COVID started. It not only rendered the content I had been leveraging before useless, but it gutted my business in nine months. So I had a lot of time on my hands to peruse Twitter as just a regular old user.

It was around the middle of 2021 when I decided to stop being a passive observer and to start taking a more active approach.

The urge to drop my professional persona and to allow my wake-up-you-idiots persona to shine through grew over the course of that year. But it was this post, in particular, that made me throw all caution to the wind:

Insider Advertising @insiderads

The question of how to deal with the millions of Americans who have chosen not to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is often framed in the starkest terms. Here are better options, according to advertising experts. 👇 businessinsider.com/6-ad-executive…

Black-and-white vintage-style photo edit shows two children against a yellow background watching a TV that says, “Order now!” with a vaccine needle. It is overlaid with text that reads: “Options for vaccinating the unwilling tend to be either using vaccine mandates to force shots into those opposed or giving up on the possibility of returning to normal life anytime soon. But advertising may be an attractive third option.”

First, I had to watch as big industry publications monetized the situation caused by the lockdowns and fear campaigns. Then, I watched as smaller businesses and websites kept shutting down because they couldn’t afford to operate or do marketing anymore.

But when I saw that companies like Business Insider were complicit in pushing the vaccine onto the population, I reached a new level of anger, disgust, and disillusionment.

Speaking out against the narrative with my small group of friends and acquaintances was clearly achieving nothing. So I figured why not use platforms like Twitter and Substack to try to connect with people who are open-minded and awake (or, at least, waking up) to what’s been happening.

Final Thoughts

I felt so helpless and so hopeless that first year after they pushed COVID out into the world. And the people around me had made me feel so crazy for questioning things or being upset about what was going on. To them, the solution was simple: Hunker down, dump my business and get a “real” job, and wait for someone to save us.

To realize I’m not alone and not so powerless (at least in the digital sense), has been a game changer.

So I want to thank Business Insider for pushing me past my breaking point. I had long since come to accept the greediness of brands like yours. However, getting to see how truly ugly and evil you are for supporting something as deadly as this “vaccine”? Woah boy, there was no way I was going to play nice after that.

What was the catalyst that got you to start pushing back?

Against the Grain

How One Tweet Inspired Me to Publicly Speak…