“We do sweeps for spam/scam accounts and sometimes real accounts get caught up in them,” Elon Musk wrote on X, responding to the temporary ban of at least 8 accounts, including those of a handful of journalists.
Buying Twitter was never about him making money. It was about giving shithead, likeminded assholes, like him, a place to openly spew their vitriol hate speech without fear of bans or repercussions.
Delete your account if you have one; don’t share links to his site and FFS let’s stop allowing hatred to have an open forum or a place within proper society.
It was disrupting the global left’s only “safe” (quotes because Twitter deserved plenty of criticism for even platforming right-wing voices far before the Musk purchase) platform for discussion. Facebook/Meta made a pretty big showing of aligning themselves with the right in the 2016 elections. Twitter was the only major online space for left-leaning individuals to discuss, except maybe Tumblr or Reddit which had a fraction of the users that Twitter did.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that the left-wing bloc (in the US, at least) has become so fractured since the Twitter takeover? It was all by design, Musk and the Saudis who bankrolled him never cared about making money off the platform. When you’ve got $220b, you can waste $40b without noticing.
Not that I ever cared for the site in the first place, but the loss of Twitter in the leftist community and lack of any majorly-adopted replacement will have tremendous impacts on the left’s ability to coordinate action for years to come.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that the left-wing bloc (in the US, at least) has become so fractured since the Twitter takeover?
It’s been fractured since long before that. The fracture started around the Occupy Wallstreet movement.
Leftist movements have been continuously attacked, suppressed, and fractured since the '60s (see also: the assassinations of MLK Jr. and Fred Hampton), if not earlier.
Nevertheless, the subversion of Twitter is particularly significant.
Almost as if they spend significant time and effort strategizing how to interfere with threats to their dominant position 😕
Are you familiar with the phrase “divide and conquer”?
Ask yourself how come there is always these fractures appearing out of nowhere as soon as leftists organize?
Well, a big part of it is that leftists are a coalition not a monolith, unlike Republicans, who all just voted for their team no matter what.
i just made up this phrase that i think democrats could use to become even more like republicans:
vote blue no matter who
Okay, not really because if you vote for a Republican in this upcoming presidential election, you probably will not vote again.
it’s so catchy, i hope tehy try it out! maybe they can characterize their opposition as traitors to the country, and lock them up, too!
It was all by design, Musk and the Saudis who bankrolled him never cared
Their plans failed and backfired on them. Now everybody is on GNUsocial or mastodon. They now created their WORST nightmare: An uncontrollable, distributed and community owned social media.
Now everybody is on GNUsocial or mastodon
LMFreakinAO my man. Mastodon has less than 2 million monthly users total. There were random animal fact Twitter accounts with 10x that before. I can’t even find any numbers for GNUsocial but I have a hard time imagining it’s any higher that Mastadon.
He bought it to make it the christofascist heaven on earth.
Before he bought it Twitter was a pretty lefty friendly place, since he took over there, conspiracy theorists and neo-nazi-fascitoid rethoric has took over all the place.
I’ve got banned like two days after he bought it LMAO.
Imagine making fun of people in defense of a website that happily allows Nazis but bans journalists.
Only the most gullible rubes have alarms raised. Every sensible person has already moved on and is ignoring the clown show. Stop using that shit.
But all these journalists will continue to use Shitter as their main platform
Yeah I’m sick of them feeding into it
I wish everyone else would just quit. It’s so much easier than people think to switch platforms for anything
Seriously. Just as many people don’t listen to my ravings on firefish/mastodon as they did on Twitter.
X is Truth Social 2.0. At this point, anybody who doesn’t delete their account is a motherfucking Nazi.
I don’t think this kind of broad generalization is helpful (FWIW, I deleted my account the day the sale was finalized)
i use it exclusively for porn and to occasionally get updates about Fairphone. guess i’m a nazi.
There are other sources for both.
yes of course, fairphone also has an instagram page. but shitter’s algorithm is really good at recommending artists to me. most of them pretty much exclusively use shitter or patreon to post their art.
Let’s say there’s a restaurant in town. It has the best burger (or veggie burger, whatever you might eat) you’ve ever tasted in your life. You can’t wait to go back. Then you see on the menu that they have an item called the n----r sandwich.
Do you keep going?
Because that’s basically your argument here.
This is the worst analogy I’ve seen lol. I understand your desire for decentralized open source whatever, but most average people don’t care, especially when the creators they follow aren’t on Mastodon.
It’s more complicated than that. In your hypothetical, everyone else in town is still going to the burger joint, they just signed a huge franchising deal, are getting national attention, and are showing no signs of a decline in business.
Your choice is not “collapse them || keep them in business”. It’s “miss out on the burger while doing them no measurable harm || eat the delicious burger while providing them negligible benefit”
In that scenario I may as well have the burger.
I’m not sure why it being national matters or not. My wife and I don’t go to Hobby Lobby because of all of their Christian dominionist bullshit. They’re a national company and my wife does tons of crafting. She could go there all the time. I could go there to buy things for her. We don’t, because they’re an evil company that can be avoided. It can be avoided even if the other options aren’t quite as good. It’s really not hard to not spend money or to not go to a website when it isn’t a necessity. “Everyone is doing it so I might as well” is also a terrible argument. It’s what people use to excuse all sorts of atrocious behavior.
In this scenario, it’s less about the damage you can do to the company and more about the damage you avoid doing to yourself.
Integrity is something only you can define for yourself. If you’re fine with it, do what you want and live with the consequences (or lack thereof).
To your example, I don’t eat Chick-fil-A, and I don’t shop at hobby lobby. There’s something to be said for “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” but those two companies in particular, I find repulsive, even though they remain incredibly popular. I know my boycott doesn’t impact them, nor does it stop anyone else from supporting them, but I feel dirty when I shop there, so I do not.
i too, would eat the delicious burger. they do still benefit from me eating it, but i can deliberately stay away from all of the racism.
yes i do support twitter by watching ads on their 1st party app, but the platform is dying already. one lurker looking up porn from their mother’s basement isn’t a huge revenue source.
Sorry you had to find out this way
Why anyone is still giving any legitimacy to that alt-right shithole is beyond me anyway. It should be clear to any journalists by now that Twitter is a dead-end.
Fucking migrate to Mastodon already!!!
What about “I want twitter to be a bastion of free speech?” And all of his cronies screeching “Musk is just preserving the first ammendment!!1!¡”
Looks like the quiet part is now being said out loud: “for Nazis and fascists”
Easy solution to that: Stop using it.
The problem is that we’re scattering. A handful to Bluesky. A smattering to Mastodon. A pittance to Lemmy. Building a unified community on a single platform again will take years.
Most clued-in people have moved to Mastodon as the Twitter replacement; it just hasn’t been fully noticed by the mainstream as the new platform. But a lot of the journalists etc are there. Unifying the Lemmy platform with the Mastodon platform to make them interoperable for real seems like it’d be a really good thing.
Don’t get me wrong it’s great the number of accounts that have moved there, but we’re not even close to where we need to be to make one platform the go-to place like Twitter was.
So, kbin? It can interact with both Lemmy and Mastodon at the same time. If you boost a lemmy post on kbin, you essentially retweet (retoot?) it to mastodon under the hashtags associated with the community.
I literally just installed an mbin instance for more or less exactly this purpose 😃
Hopefully what emerges will be harder to dismantle at least. Especially since it seems there’s a vested interest in killing these unified communities.
Our best bet right now is the EU at this point.
That’s how Linux happened. Microsoft got so good at eliminating competition, and so lazy about making a product that was more than barely-passable, that it created a unique combination of “we want something good” and “something good cannot be constructed” that drove a whole generation of techies to get familiar with Linux simply because there was no good alternative for certain types of serious computing. The selection pressure of “any competitor company will get destroyed” eventually produced a competitor that wasn’t a company.
I think that’s what’s happening right now in social media. For a long time ActivityPub went nowhere, and then the big players all got so godawful that you couldn’t ignore the godawfulness, and now look what’s happening. It’s not because Mastodon and Lemmy are great “products” as such; mostly, people just want something that’s not shit. Then in the longer run the selection pressure will create something that’ll be a lot harder to kill or control.
It would have been easier for Facebook and Twitter not to be shit, but apparently that’s too much to ask. I think the ultimate outcome will be way for the better this way.
Linux also only has a 15% market share if you include servers, while Twitter was the place for journalists to give up-to-the-minute updates. It’s going to be difficult to get people to get away from that, just as it’s difficult to get people to stop using Windows.
That’s not exactly what I was saying… Linux powers 70% of the cell phones in the world, 96% of the top 1,000,000 web sites, and literally all of the world’s supercomputers.
I’m not saying your 15% number is wrong, just that including end-user desktops in the “market share” misses the mark of what I meant when I was talking about serious computing. I wasn’t talking about trying to replace Windows as an end-user system of choice. Windows arguably still does a better job than Linux does at that, just as fediverse may never replace Tiktok. I was talking about suppressing competition within a different badly-needed niche creating a more resistant competitor in the long run.
It’s about a unified message and unified ideology; it’s not about having everyone on one website.
It’s about being able to effectively spread that unified message, which having disjointed platforms impedes.
That’s really the beauty of decentralized federated platforms though. People can be scattered to multiple platforms that do their thing but can interoperate with other platforms still. Granted, we’re still in sort of the infancy and ugly part of development and growth but so long as momentum doesn’t die out, it could be the new norm sometime in this decade.
However, I fear, much like the world-wide web, something who’s potential for humanity is so great can be ruined by business strategists and marketeers after all the hard work is done by people that genuinely care and sacrificed so much effort for the benefit of everyone else.
I don’t care, do U?
Yes. Because people go where other people are. Until people start coalescing on a specific site, Twitter is still going to be relevant.
For fucks sake just switch to mastodon already
Most unhelpful comment. I’m here for news, not advice that doesn’t even apply to me.
This wasnt really advice i was just saying that a lotnof people complain about twitter ON TWITTER. And when you just mention the possibility of using mastodon they have a nervous breakdown.
I’m just annoyed because all of the top few comments were all along the same lines. It gets old seeing people always respond to news articles with “ditch Twitter”, “ditch Chrome”, “ditch Windows”, etc. instead of addressing the specific story.
Yeah maybe but i didnt read the other comments lol
It’s called voting with your wallet. Even if said wallet is merely your engagement and user data. It will encourage the place you left to improve
Why are they on there? It was obvious long ago that it’s a liability having an account on that service.
Why would anyone would still be on Xitter blows my mind.
Ironically it’s probably because they feel at home, appreciated and valued in their own safe space. (There’s also probably quite a few increasingly unhappy almost technologically-illiterate legacy users who just need a helping hand to make the move.)
For context, I have deleted my Twitter account. But when I did use it, it was exclusively to follow bands/musicians, so I never encountered anything other than musicians and their fans. It was for the most part a nice experience, minus the band mate/fan made drama, but I never followed or cared for that aspect anyways. I never encountered the racist, homophobic, or nazi-like shit most news articles talk about because my bubble was strictly defined to music. I just followed to be informed on the latest band’s album news or tour updates and things like that.
But since I’m not a hermit, and I’m AWARE of what Twitter has become, I’ve left it behind because I don’t want to support a single cent of ad revenue to the asshat in charge. I can still get most of my music related news from Discord (which has its own host of problems, but I digress), so I stopped using Twitter and refuse to click any of it’s links. And even if I have to click a Twitter link from a journalist or something, I have Nitter Redirect addon for Firefox installed, so at least there’s that option as a last resort. Other than that Twitter is fucking dead to me.
the alarm has been raised for quite some time. why are these articles written like they’re unaware of the past?
Red flag collectors are in for a great year
musk waking up in the morning should raise alarms…
“Oh we weren’t doing this out of malice… we’re simply so incompetent we accidentally ban legit users!”
Oh yeah, great alibi. I totally believe that on the site where reports for rape threats, racism and calls for genocide regularly are stated as not breaking community rules your stringent automods might accidentally ban legitimate users.
And those legitimate users just happen to be a bunch of journalists. Somehow.
This is a great example of why Hanlon’s razor is bullshit.
It’s simple. Stop using X. Switch to Mastodon.
