My team and I knew having me run for California governor in the 2022 primary election would not be a cakewalk, mainly because I’m a truth-teller and, as we know, the media and technocrats aren’t fans of this.
In addition, we knew we had to reach the 22 million California registered voters on a shoestring budget, travel thousands of miles over the elongated state of California, and, most challenging, sidestep growing censorship. But we still thought it worth a try. We knew simply having a different conversation, questioning the official narrative, and proposing real-world solutions would be worth all the effort.
Everything was as we expected except…for the new level of unbridled censorship.
Holy Cow.
In the fall of 2021, we were already having campaign difficulties. Our campaign team could not share attachments. Campaign emails weren’t delivered. This went on for months. But on Tuesday, January 11th, 2022, cancel culture struck the campaign not once, not twice, but four times.
It began when I got a call at the crack of dawn from my Communications Director, Jamie Arrigo, in a panic, asking, Are you on Instagram?
I said, No, why? She responded, They’ve taken you down.
I was shocked. How could they take down this account? This particular Instagram page was the most docile page I had ever had, covering years of my community activism and events, and very positive and solution-oriented covering my gubernatorial campaign —- but this did not matter. Without warning or any notice, it was permanently removed.
A California gubernatorial candidate had just been erased.
As Jamie and I began scrambling, I did what I had recently done on the campaign trail; I got onto Uber Eats to order some coffee and breakfast to think more clearly. I had just landed in Pasadena a few days earlier, was without wheels, and depended upon Uber for transportation and food until my partner would arrive by car and join me later on the campaign trail.
As I attempted to finalize my order for the coffee I so desperately needed now more than ever, I discovered that Uber Eats had just canceled me as well. My order was rejected because I no longer had an account with them.
Hmmmm.
I jumped onto Uber rides to see what was up, and it, too, had canceled my account. Not only did they cancel me, but they ultimately refunded all of my food and ride payments from my current stay in Pasadena.
No explanation. No response from customer service. No way to ever download and reinstall the apps ever again. I was canceled and still am to this day.
If three cancellations weren’t enough for one day, I jumped onto my personal Facebook account, which has been a hot, controversial page for 14 years. And yet, amazingly, over these years, I had never faced the type of cancelation I had just received from Instagram and Uber that morning.
However, now, for the first time, Facebook decided on that fateful day to flag posts from the past year, and I was notified that my posts were going to be at the bottom of the feed for the next three months — pretty much taking us up to Election Day.
I had just encountered a quadruple cancellation on the same day.
Canceled twice in one day could be considered a coincidence. But three times? Four times? No, this was beyond happenstance.
That was just the beginning of severe censorship. From that point on, it only got worse.
Over the next few months, this is what I, my team, and supporters encountered:
We had my Instagram account analyzed on the backend: IG’s ReinetteSenum2.0 had been throttled while we could see Gavin Newsom’s page was being pushed out an additional 50%
Instagram live interviews posted later would have the audio removed precisely when my run for governor was mentioned.
We attempted to open multiple social media accounts and were blocked every single time.
We had a fantastic online team. However, many times, they could not share campaign materials we sent them.
My social media posts were very difficult, if not impossible, to share in general.
Supporters who attempted to share their images or videos of me on the campaign trail always had great difficulty posting/sharing and many times had no success.
Statewide voter guides that had me as their official Candidate of Choice could not be shared/sent on any online platform except for Telegram. These PDFs could not be shared through messages or emails; they would never reach their destination.
Not only was my website ElectReinette.com significantly censored, but I began to get reports that simply my name, “Reinette Senum,” was popping up as a “community standards violation” in the comments of posts and stories about my campaign.
We could not boost any Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok posts or buy ads.
We could not buy Google ads. Google informed us they don’t do political ads. We responded that this was not the case because my competitors had ads everywhere. No response.
My local hometown newspaper, The Union (that I sat on the Editorial Board of only six years earlier), would not cover my run for governor.
The local “alternative” radio station where I was a radio host for a decade closed its doors to the broadcasters the day Newsom gave his original stay-at-home orders. They then erased all of my radio shows over the years, never allowed me and other outspoken “talk show” hosts to return, and never mentioned on the air that I was running for governor.
Despite my two personal visits, submitted documents, and payment, the California Secretary of State never released the California voter rolls for us to contact voters regarding my campaign.
The only option that remained to make Californians aware I was running was to rent 50 digital billboards in So Cal and the Bay Area. God only knows if those were even activated around the state.
In addition, our remarkable California ground crews were standing in intersections waving massive banners and dropping them over highway overpasses across the state.
The censorship was so egregious that our most ardent supporters got creative and launched a website and guerrilla-style “Who Is Reinette Senum” campaign (seems this page is being affected to) and grabbed clips (video above) of famous people talking about different people (Friends’ Courtney Cox talking about her daughter, Lady Gaga talking about one of her peers, and Johnny Depp speaking about a co-star, Snoop Dogg about Martha Stewart), and made them appear as if they were talking about Reinette Senum.
The simple objective was to sidestep the campaign censorship with some humor by getting parallel “Who Is Reinette Senum” campaign videos in front of the public’s face so they would get curious, do an online search, and find ElectReinette.com —allowing them to find out that they had a viable alternative to Newsom.
Clever. Funny. The “Who Is Reinette Senum” campaign was irreverent and made me giggle. And yet it still didn’t work. People could not share the video clips, they could not purchase to boost the posts even from their personal pages, and they could not share the link on any other platforms. Anything related to me, my campaign, or my name was canceled.
Not a problem, except we supposedly live in a free country. How can an official gubernatorial candidate be this canceled in a free society?
I should take this all as a compliment. Why would “the system” be so afraid of a grassroots candidate that they would feel the need to cancel their Uber rides, food, social media, and even name from the internet?
But an even larger question should be posed: How can we possibly have a fair and transparent election if you can't hear from candidates, to begin with?
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The Day Instagram, Facebook, Uber, and Uber Eats Canceled a California Gubernatorial Candidate