Rhyheim Shabazz, Most-Followed Male Adult Star, Suspended on Twitter

Rhyheim Shabazz, a gay adult content creator that shot to fame after launching his career in early 2019, has been suspended from Twitter. Shabazz, who recently became the most-followed male adult performer in history after eclipsing the one million mark, is reportedly one of more than 30 accounts that were taken down.

Shabazz's career has largely operated through his fan site platforms, making his Twitter account one of his primary tools of marketing. While he has done multiple scenes for TimTales, the lionshare of his work appears on his personal pages and he shares teaser clips regularly onto his Twitter account -- as well as the Twitter accounts of a loose network of collaborators -- to drum up subscriptions. The power of his platform can launch other performers: earlier this year, within the span of eight days one actor's account went from launch to over 30,000 followers largely due to his cross-promotion.

This week, Shabazz's account was suspended as evidenced by a note on Twitter as well as by industry blog Str8UpGayPorn (link NSFW.) Other accounts like @EyeFilmz, @RealTalox, and @Farley_XX, all of whom are or once were close Shabazz collaborators, have also been suspended. The reason given to all account users was "violating our rules against ban evasion." According to Shabazz, none had evaded suspension by creating new accounts.

According to a blog operated by Scruff Brazil, some 30 Brazilian performers have had their accounts suspended as well. Among others, these include Ronny Aislan and Caio Rodrigues. According to a translation, those accounts received an email from Twitter's legal team saying to remove content but did not specify what content should be removed. Days later, they were suspended.

It is not known whether the suspensions are all connected but many of Shabazz's collaborators are based in Brazil, and he often visited there to create content. He has worked with quite a number of those suspended.

A year ago, Shabazz as well as some of his collaborators and other porn performers like Max Konnor, were the subject of a troll maliciously using Twitter's reporting tool to get accounts suspended in order to blackmail them. After a protracted back and forth, the suspension finally went through but Twitter then repealed it later, restoring the account.

Out has reached out to Twitter for comment and will update if we receive one.

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