I woke up this morning to the below Tweet notification on my phone. I was suspicious, so I decided to read more and licked on the article.

After reading through the article and doing some follow up on my own it does look like the below 6 accounts were banned on Steemit as if you try and go to the Steemit page you get the below error.

1. mateja.klaric Steemit Steempeak Busy
2. xondra Steemit Steempeak Busy
3. tgylhn Steemit Steempeak Busy
4. vichkovski Steemit Steempeak Busy
5. wizzymt Steemit Steempeak Busy
6. thedarkoverlord Steemit Steempeak Busy

What I Found on the Accounts

It appears that the first 5 accounts on the list were requested to be removed from the Steemit site. I don't know if this is true or not, but when you click on one of there posts and scroll to the comments you'll see a comment from @smitop on at least the latest article if not all the articles

This account has requested to be added to the list of deleted accounts. It will soon no longer be visible on Steemit.com. Additionally, you will not be able to log in.
However, this account and all of it's data is permanently and irreversibly stored on the blockchain. It is also visible on other Steem-based apps, such as https://busy.org/@vichkovski

Its hard to know if wizzymt has made the request because he/she hasn't done anything except decide to follow 8 people. People who are more familiar with accessing information directly from the blockchain may discover more information than me, but even Steemd only shows the below.

That means @steemitboard should create an achievement for first account banned from Steemit for @thedarkoverlord! I did find it interesting that Busy was the only site that displays everything for this account. Steemit shows that the page doesn't exist as shown above. @steempeak shows the title and the comments but displays the below for the article which I would argue isn't entirely accurate.

Damage to Steem

When it Tweet goes out like this it can and does do a lot of damage. The initial Tweet linking the CCN article has 44 comments, 87 retweets, and 214 likes. The second follow up Tweet only had 2 comments, 1 retweet, and 4 likes. Even @stackin retweet only had 2 retweets and 2 likes. Just on retweets alone, the follow-up tweet received over 80 less and that doesn't take into account the retweet of the retweet.

I'm glad to say that people on Steemit are already making posts to clear up this ongoing issue that I don't think will ever go away. One post I've seen was @lukestokes post and there are plenty of great comments on The-Bitcoin-Dood's follow up Steemit post politely correcting him.

Good News for Steem

I think this is the first time that I've seen someone that is outside of my Steem circle, talking about Steem on twitter. Even if it was for something such as false accusations of censorship, that Tweet went out to bitcoindood's 42,000 followers. Even if just 1% of his followers come to Steemit to check it out and 1% of those sign up for an account that's a possible 42 new accounts created if just .1% of the people do more digging (assuming they don't already have accounts such as myself).

This has also motivated me into branching out my brand onto Twitter more. When I get home tonight I'm going to make a Tweet linking this article to hopefully help people understand that Steemit Inc and Steemit.com is a private business / dapp on the Steem blockchain. I don't have much of a Twitter following, but with the decentralized movement we have on Steemit right now hopefully others more eloquent and technologically savvy than I can write some articles or create some videos about how Steem is different than Steemit.

If you do write or create something on this topic let me know in the comments down below so I can write some Tweets sharing said articles over the next couple of days.