I considered leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, just not wanting to be part of a community that could be bought, least of all by a man like him – the obnoxious “long hours at a high intensity” bullying of his staff began immediately. But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous.
“Twitter has broken the mould,” Mulhall says. “It’s ostensibly a mainstream platform which now has bespoke moderation policies. Elon Musk is himself inculcated with radical right politics. So it’s behaving much more like a bespoke platform, created by the far right. This marks it out significantly from any other platform. And it’s extremely toxic, an order of magnitude worse, not least because, while it still has terms of service, they’re not necessarily implementing them.”
Global civil society, though, finds it incredibly difficult to reject the free speech argument out of hand, because the alternative is so dark: that a number of billionaires – not just Musk but also Thiel with Rumble, Parler’s original backer, Rebekah Mercer (daughter of Robert Mercer, funder of Breitbart), and, indirectly, billionaire sovereign actors such as Putin – are successfully changing society, destroying the trust we have in each other and in institutions. It’s much more comfortable to think they’re doing that by accident, because they just love “free speech”, than that they’re doing that on purpose. “Part of understanding the neo-reactionary and ‘dark enlightenment’ movements, is that these individuals don’t have any interest in the continuation of the status quo,”
And is it ethical to keep using it?
How is this even a debate? No! The answer is fucking “no”!
I’ve lost to faith in several self proclaimed leftists over this that I have followed (not on Twitter) for years. They cannot let go of what they have “built for themselves” there and refuse to accept their own actions have consequences when they wear their blue checkmark with pride like storm troops wore their swastikas back in the 1930s. Everything is a class struggle except when it would impact them. Then it conveniently becomes a mere transaction between them and a provider and you shouldn’t think too much about it because it benefits them. And if it benefits them, it benefits the cause, right? Right???
Should I not go to the Nazi Fair even though the food is really good and the vendors are all nice people?
Yeah, except the food sucks and it’s full of Nazis…
The article says they don’t want to leave because of their high follower counts…
But most of them are bots, inactive, or Nazis following so they can troll comments easier.
They care about an empty number and won’t do the slightest work to improve an alternative.
is it ethical to stop using a racist platform owned by a racist?
gee i wonder
maybe its not ethical for media outlets to not continually call out twitter for its racist propaganda.
No.
Move to Mastodon.
hmmm I wonder if that is considered in the thousands of words of this article…
It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the rival platform Mastodon, but fast realised that I would never get 70,000 followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down and the rest are all selling the same thing.
There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough
Society’s modern artificially induced ADHD on display here. Anybody remember when websites were all static and didn’t dynamically change at all?
CGI was a pretty early invention, so you would have had to be on the Web very early indeed to remember when it was entirely static. Main difference between the server-side era and now was that the usual way for pages to show changes back then was to autotrigger the browser’s reload mechanism after a fixed time.
it’s always been full of hatred; it just had a trust and safety team that attempted to do something about it before elon.
