onfocus

"Beyond Musk’s political affiliations, his actual political convictions—by which I mean the bedrock set of values, ideologies, and organizing principles through which he sees the world and wishes it to be structured—are a slightly different conversation. Here, I tend to agree with The Verge’s Liz Lopatto, who wrote recently that Musk doesn’t really have political beliefs, only personal interests. But one can have vapid or nonexistent political beliefs and still be a political activist. Political activism is about actions."

If someone behaves exactly like a far right activist it doesn't matter what they believe in their heart. Debate should center around known actions, not unknowable motivations.

"The debt financing around Twitter is gob-smacking. I cannot for the life of me understand what the creditors were thinking, but the game of finance is a next level sport where destroying people, companies, and products to achieve victory is widely tolerated. Historical trends suggest that the losers in this chaos will not be Musk or the banks, but the public."

Failure is a process—it doesn't happen overnight.

"The lack of action extends to new accounts affiliated with terror groups and others that Twitter previously banned. In the first 12 days after Mr. Musk assumed control, 450 accounts associated with ISIS were created, up 69 percent from the previous 12 days, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms."

Same name, completely different site.

“I’ll have to repair nearly every article I’ve ever written since my tweets got wiped out,” journalist and videographer Vishal Singh wrote on Mastodon on Monday, after being banned from Twitter. “Hundreds of articles written by countless journalists used my tweets. From all sides of the political spectrum. Academic papers that cited my tweets. These links and embeds are now all broken.”

The ability to purge the public record is a good argument against citizens relying on private companies to host/protect the public record.

"Between January 2020 and September 2022, Twitter suspended more than 11,000 accounts for breaking Covid misinformation rules and removed almost 100,000 pieces of content that violated those rules, according to statistics published by Twitter."

Not any more. Those accounts are back and there’s no effort to remove misinformation. "Public square" now considered actively harmful.

"There are various theories purporting to explain Musk’s hard right turn: a childhood in apartheid South Africa, his connection with Peter Thiel, disappointments in his personal life. Whatever the truth of the matter, whatever right-leaning tendencies he may have had before a couple years ago appear to have been latent or unformed. Now the transformation is almost complete. He’s done with general “free speech” grievance and springing for alternative viewpoints. He’s routinely pushing all the far right storylines from woke groomers to great replacement."

Billionaires are not immune to radicalization. Unfortunately society is not immune to billionaires.

The removal of the president from the two offices that interested him most—the presidency and his twitter account—gave the platform new life. The hellsite was still a shadow of its earlier days, sure, but finally began to reemerge as a somewhat more healthy medium for serious communication.

And then Elon bought it.

Excellent summary of the current state of Twitter and why it's time to move on.

"Even if academic Twitter ends up largely moving to Mastodon, the big question is whether the general public will move there, too, allowing scientists to communicate with more than just each other. “When I tweet, I’m talking to my neighbor and the person in the grocery store and the teenager who is thinking about studying science in college,” Fiesler says. “That’s the beauty of scientists on social media.”"

My wife signed up for Mastodon yesterday to follow covid researchers. She doesn’t post, isn’t a scientist, and just wants to follow experts having public conversations. That’s just one data point but I think people will move to where conversations are happening. And if that conversation environment doesn’t also have to feed the advertising machine it could be healthier.

"Many of us with larger presences on the platform have seen a significant drop in our follower counts as people make good on their threat to exit. This is, of course, as much their right as it is Musk’s to buy the platform and run it as he pleases. But I think leaving is a mistake."

LOL I have to admit there is some Schadenfreude happening at this moment. Social media has been so awful for so long. Let me have this.

"Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies."

It's like a heroin addict thought his best move would be buying the entire heroin supply chain. Congrats, now you have an addiction AND all the problems of being in the drug trade. But Musk's personal disaster aside, does every online social space need to be run by a weirdo right wing authoritarian? That seems bad for everyone.

"Salma al-Shehab, a Saudi student living in the UK and attending Leeds University, was sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account and following and retweeting dissidents and activists. She was arrested and convicted after returning home for a holiday."

Saudi Arabia partnered with Elon Musk to become the 2nd largest investor in Twitter. It doesn’t look like Musk is building a free speech platform.

"Twitter making a significant donation to any political committee in 2022 is unusual. Twitter shut down its PAC in 2020 and has subsequently avoided making any political donations. Now the company is supporting a group that is seeking to revoke reproductive rights nationally, even as Twitter has quietly adopted a policy to help employees to access abortion care."

Quite a way to get back into political giving at this particular moment in time. Garbage fire.