The Final Call

On The Offensive: Was Minister Farrakhan’s Twitter account attacked?

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His number of Twitter followers dropped by over 20,000 within a 48-hour period!

Before you chalk this up as merely a “glitch in the matrix” or another so-called Nation of Islam conspiracy theory (smile), let’s examine what occurred just before this loss of followers.

In a February 9 chess move, unforeseen by his enemies, Minister Farrakhan flew to Los Angeles to have lunch with Grammy award-winning singer Mary J. Blige and her husband Kendu Isaacs. This was done in the midst of controversy stemming from the release of the Lifetime film, Betty and Coretta.

He followed that up by posting sharp responses to questions from social media related to Betty and Coretta and the assassination of Malcolm X. “I did not kill Malcolm X,” he tweeted.

Minister Farrakhan also released exclusive photos via his Twitter account and FinalCall.com from what he described as a “joyous lunch with my good friend Mary J. Blige and her husband.”

All of this and more was used to infiltrate the #BettyandCoretta Twitter hashtag and resulted in a critical takeover of the online dialogue. The information was continuing to spread and digital warfare had been waged by the Nation of Islam social media army and its supporters.

On Feb. 11, Hip-Hop mogul Russell Simmons had his website GlobalGrind.com post the images of Minister Farrakhan and Mary J. Blige to let readers know that there was no beef between the two. He then tweeted to his 2.5 million followers, “Guess the rumors about @LouisFarrakhan and @MaryJBlige are false.”

Later that same day, Wyclef tweeted to his 3 million followers, “I love the unity being exhibited by @LouisFarrakhan and @MarjBlige to dispel the rumors!”

Then on the afternoon of Feb. 12, Mary J. Blige tweeted this beautiful message to her 3.5 million followers: “Thank you @LouisFarrakhan for spending time with us and sharing your words of wisdom with us. We love you so much.”

That’s a combined nine million Twitter followers between those celebrities who publicly mentioned Minister Farrakhan, who had over 170,000 followers at that time.

Within a few hours of Mary J. Blige’s tweet, the follower count for Minister Farrakhan started rapidly declining by the hundreds, then the thousands.

We filed multiple complaints via Twitter’s ticketing page. And even a supporter of Minister Farrakhan, who is considered a social media guru, sent an e-mail on our behalf directly to his contact at Twitter, Inc. to expedite the investigation.

Within a week, Minister Farrakhan’s account had dipped to nearly 141,000 followers.

Now over a month later of continuous email exchanges, the only responses and explanations we have been provided from Twitter Support are “users with large amounts of followers often have following numbers that fluctuate a great deal” and “we don’t currently have any known issues or bugs involving follower counts. It’s common to see some regular attrition of followers.”

The fact that Minister Farrakhan’s account has never experienced such a drop in followers like this in his two years of tweeting and that we do not own this social media site, it’s very difficult to accept this on face value.

It’s a shame this beautiful man can’t even have a Twitter page without something like this occurring. He has sacrificed countless hours responding to thousands of questions tweeted to him by his followers. It’s not out of vanity, it’s born out of his love to meet people where they are in hopes of providing life-saving guidance and warning.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone on Twitter delivering the type of divine wisdom in tweets like Minister Farrakhan’s #AskFarrakhan chats. If you’re not following him on Twitter, you’re missing out greatly. He is striving to get God’s Way trending in our thoughts and actions.

Thus far one victory has been secured in the midst of this digital debacle. Twitter decided to give Minister Farrakhan a blue verification seal for his page. This is something afforded mostly to important figures. We had been fighting for this as well, yet it took this incident for it to finally happen.

How can you help? Follow these four easy steps:

1) Go to www.Twitter.com and Sign up for an account. 2) Check your e-mail for the verification link 3) Sign-in and go to Minister Farrakhan’s page http://twitter.com/LouisFarrakhan and click the “Follow” button. 4) Invite all of your Twitter followers and Facebook friends to follow him.

Information is warfare.

(Jesse Muhammad is based in Houston. You can follow him on Twitter @BrotherJesse and send your social media questions to him via email at [email protected].)