“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.
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.
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Imagine making fun of people in defense of a website that happily allows Nazis but bans journalists.
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.
Leftist movements have been kept fractured in the US since the start of the 20th century. The lefts accomplishments peaked in the 1930s and 40s with FDRs new deal. And has been on a steady fractured declined since.
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.
Wasn’t this alarm raised when he first got control? Is anything here actually new? Not really. This is clickbait.
not clickbait
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”
Why are they on there? It was obvious long ago that it’s a liability having an account on that service.
Elon: Yes, we do occasionally do sweeps for the Jews, I mean journalist, I mean terrorist…
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.
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.
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.
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 😃
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.
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.
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.
But all these journalists will continue to use Shitter as their main platform
Ex fucking actly.
Xitter is a shit show. It’s terrible. Silencing journalists shouldn’t happen.
That said, just abandon it already.
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.
“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.
This is a great example of why Hanlon’s razor is bullshit.
And those legitimate users just happen to be a bunch of journalists. Somehow.
Why are people still using that dumpster fire?
🇸 🇴 🇱 🇪 🇦 🇻 🇪 🇹 🇼 🇦 🇹 🇹 🇪 🇷
There is no reason for anyone to still be on that website unless they’re Nazis. Full stop.
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.
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The accounts, which were restored within hours,
Yes, they will and they did
