At this point, I fully believe the conspiracy theory that Elon Musk is just a scapegoat/shill who is intentinally destroying twitter because it was a good tool for people to organize against companies and governments.
I’ll buy that as a motivation, but I think he’s destroying it because he’s a petty bitch who can’t handle that he was forced by the courts to do something, namely buy Twitter.
Those are the motivations of his sponsors (the Saudis etc). He thought it contributed to his trans child’s “woke mind virus” and he definitely threatened to buy it out of rage and then once forced to decided he’d fucking destroy it
and to try and sell teslas to the right
Those are the motivations of his sponsors (the Saudis etc). He thought it contributed to his trans child’s “woke mind virus” and he definitely threatened to buy it out of rage and then once forced to decided he’d fucking destroy it
My biggest problem with all the conspiracies is they don’t seem to account for his very obvious incompetence.
Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like we are starting to see more direct actions between members of different classes.
Every action taken without repercussions emboldens their next.
It’s been awhile since the last feast, so the rich are losing their fear.
Tom Nicholas referred to Musk as the “World’s Oldest Teenager” and he’s not wrong.
If you’re using Twitter, you’re supporting #fascism. Full stop.
the petty little shit this asswipe pulls is just fucking pathetic.
It suprises me that people are still on Twitter. https://joinmastodon.org/
join Mastodon! : the commie twitter alternative. so much for X’s freedom of speech
I must say it is amusing watching the same people who cheered Twitter censorship the last few years suddenly realise why giving companies the power to sensor is a bad idea. Eventually the gun gets turned on you. Always resist censorship. Especially speech you disagree with. Free speech is useless unless you can say things which people disagree with.
Always resist censorship.
Can I follow you around with a siren that I turn on every time you attempt to speak?
Using a siren to silence me is just another form of censorship.
You telling me to silence my siren is censorship. I’m using it to voice my opinion.
I thought you said that you were against all forms of censorship.
The “censorship” from before Musk took over was mostly banning hate speech, death threats, and calls for violence. Sometimes all three were in the same tweet.
Now it’s banning union organizing and people wanting to be paid a fair wage for a day’s work. Totally the same.
Most people agree with censoring hate speech and death threats. The problem is they expanded well beyond that, all while people cheered. The chants of, “it’s a private company!” were deafening. So now they can lie in the bed they made.
Even before Musk, twitter amplified right-wing nonsense.
Now it’s openly full of Nazis, because Musk unbanned them.
But you’re right, it is a private company, and thus not subject to any definition of free speech.
Here’s the thing. People do have free speech and can publicly say that they think the new twitter is a Nazi fulled dumpster fire run by a racist man-baby who got rich off of an Apartheid era emerald mine.
I think exceptions need to be made for obvious propaganda, disinformation, gaslighting, and hate speech. Dangerous lies and calls for violence do not need a platform, that’s quite different from silencing people for merely having a different opinion.
I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, but it seems too easy for those definitions to get spun off into just “things the majority dislikes” which isn’t great. I would hope that dangerous lies could be countered in the comments, and the platforms are then setup to always include this conversation rather than letting the first poster hog the megaphone
I used to believe the free marketplace of ideas worked this way, then the Trump years and the pandemic happened. It became clear to me that many people cannot and/or do not care to know the difference between evidence-based conclusions & obvious and dangerous lies, provided it supports their preexisting biases. Just look at the hostility many harbor for fact-checking.
“A lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on.”—Mark Twain, (possibly apocryphal quote but still relevant)
I’m not going to hang out in a bar that allows Nazis to hang out. You can if you like, but people are going to call you a Nazi supporter, and they will be right. If you don’t allow Nazis in your bar, they can still stand outside and freeze peach as much as they want, you are not curtailing anyone’s freedom. So, yes, I cheer businesses that don’t allow Nazis and I am critical of businesses where the management trolls unions (and allows Nazis), and that’s not hypocritical in any way because there’s a difference between good things and bad things. Anyway, enjoy your Nazi bar, weirdo.
First, twitter removing a post/banning a user/enforcing a policy is free speech. The government preventing it is anti-free speech. The government cannot tell the New York Times what to publish or not to publish, and it likewise cannot force twitter to do so. I cannot force the Washington Post to publish my op-ed on how bananas should be banned because they’re phallic and make me uncomfortable. Twitter has the right to suspend the UAW account, or delete all of its posts, or whatever it wants to do.
People are upset because Elmo uses his right to suspend and so on as personal vendettas. He’s erratic, unstable, and impulsive. Again, it’s his company and it’s his right. Hell, given that he’s destroyed between 70% and 90% of a $44B company’s value by indulging in his idiotic whims, I wouldn’t expect anything different. A literal dart-throwing chimp would be a better manager. It’s obvious why Jack Dorsey got a guaranteed buyout at $54.20 when he agreed to hold onto his $1B holdings during the transition. He could now technically shut down twitter by removing up to 25% of its remaining valuation. If the Saudis got a similar deal, that’s another $1.5B. So Elmo isn’t just paying $1B per year servicing the debt he took on to stupidly buy a company in an industry he knows less than nothing about, those guaranteed buybacks are like additional loans that can be called in at any time If he did end up tanking the value of the company down into the $4B range, it is closing in on being worth less than $0.
So this is to be expected, just like him fucking with the NYT and anyone else he disagrees with is to be expected. People can still call it out as indicative of who he is.
And you know this is nothing like censoring hate speech or dangerous disinformation. You’re just making a bad faith argument.
That’s right. You should ban bananas because people are peeling them wrong
