In brief
- NZ Media Watch’s X account was permanently suspended for “authenticity” violations, with no examples provided.
- Creator Brynn Neilson says five appeals went unanswered and that years of archived broadcast footage were erased.
- The channel captured TVNZ and other news bulletins for later fact-checking.
- Neilson believes coordinated activist complaints helped trigger the ban.
- X has not responded to Centrist’s request for comment.
NZ Media Watch’s popular X account was permanently suspended without explanation. The man behind the channel, Brynn Neilson, says his suspension has become a case study in how political speech can be quietly suppressed on major social platforms without explanation, evidence, or human review.
NZ Media Watch had been gaining traction for archiving and critiquing broadcast news from TVNZ and others. In mid-October, it disappeared.
When Neilson logged in on 19 October, a notice told him his account had been removed for “violating our rules against authenticity”. The platform provided no examples of posts that breached policy or of any material that supported the claim.
His tagline stated clearly that the channel was run by “New Zealand news and analysis by Brynn Neilson” and carried his profile photo. It had never impersonated any person or organisation. Neilson also said he attributed the original copyright owners of all footage and believed his use fell under New Zealand’s Fair dealing provisions.
Over the next month, Neilson filed five appeals through the automated system. None received a reply.
On 14 November, X sent a short email stating that the account had been suspended for “multiple or repeat violations”, again without evidence, and closed the case. X told him that replies would not be monitored.
The message ended with, “This account will not be restored.”
Centrist asked X to explain the suspension decision. No response has been received.
Neilson says no human has engaged with any of the appeals, and all his media, including years of archived clips, have been removed from the platform.
“I’d also renewed my annual X Premium Subscription (blue tick verification) in May. There was no refund for that either,” he said.
He has backups of all his material, but cannot access the copies stored on X since the suspension took effect.
NZ Media Watch designed to ‘fact-check’ the media
Neilson created NZ Media Watch to preserve broadcasts that vanish from public view.
“TVNZ’s 1News at Six broadcasts are only publicly available online for seven days, which makes it very difficult to ‘fact-check’ them historically,” Neilson said.
He built an automated recording system that captures mainstream media news footage each night and stores it for long-term analysis.
His posts regularly showed side-by-side comparisons between original broadcasts and later political claims, allowing viewers to track shifts, omissions and errors in real time.
He says the suspension matters because it removes a source of archived footage that other commentators rely on and limits the public’s ability to review broadcast reporting after the seven-day window closes.
“Much of my commentary, which debunks their reporting, used that archived footage to show their bias,” Neilson told Centrist.
Neilson says that many NZ Media Watch followers were MPs, journalists and political bloggers.
Some of the material he published had been widely shared. In January 2024, he analysed claims by two prominent figures during coverage of the Treaty Principles Bill. He argued that their statements were factually incorrect and had been broadcast without scrutiny.
In another example, he drew attention to a Newshub segment from 2023 in which footage of a public event was edited in a way that cast British women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen as a Nazi. The clip was later removed from the broadcaster’s online library.
An activist target
Posts routinely reached tens of thousands of views and generated hundreds of comments. Neilson believes that reach made the account a target for activists who objected to his criticism of race-based policy, his scepticism of government-funded Māori initiatives and his coverage of transgender policy in schools.
He says the same small group has been trying to discredit him since July. They had accused him of running another account he denies owning, a claim later dropped by the Daily Blog after a correction.
He believes coordinated complaints to X helped trigger the suspension. He also points to similar experiences reported by Māori vloggers (video bloggers) who criticise activist politics, including Corina Shields and the host of the channel Shubz Live.
“They don’t like it when Maori speak out about Maori activists in government and radical trans ideology infiltrating our schools,” he said.
