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”!
Asking that question is the first step people need in order to finally come to that conclusion. We all just completed the process a loooooong time ago.
I left when Musk started paying Andrew Tate. Never looked back
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???
It’s not, but the people who care about ethics and would answer yes, already left.
So now it’s just everyone else. Articles like this aren’t really aimed at us.
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.
you would have had to be on the Web very early indeed to remember when it was entirely static
Correct. My first web browser was Mosaic. I was using it on my Dad’s PC in 1994 at 12 years old.
Imagine not having 70,000 followers. Fate worse then death.
The purpose of twitter like platforms is to have people to listen to and people to listen to you, so yes vastly lower user counts is a drawback.
It’s the chicken and egg problem. People don’t move to Mastodon because there are less users and there are less users because people don’t move.
However if someone consumes less social media because there are “less people making noise”, I consider that a good thing.
it’s always been full of hatred; it just had a trust and safety team that attempted to do something about it before elon.
And is it ethical to keep using it?
No. And I’ll go further: if you still use it, at the very least you’re an entitled arsehole ranking their own dopamine over the well-being of everyone else. And you deserve to be treated as such.
But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories:
They’re weighting the emotional investment in the platform, caused by their earlier interactions, with it, as if it mattered when deciding future usage. It does not; that’s a fallacy = stupid shit called “sunken cost”.
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
Refer to what I said about the title.
Stopped reading here. This article is a waste of my time.
If someone is still questioning if they should be on Twitter, then they don’t know enough about what’s going on to speak about why people shouldnt still be using it.
It’s not exactly complicated.
Have you considered that maybe other people have different priorities, needs and desires to you, and that for people coming around to your point of view you should encourage them rather than castigate them for taking too long?
If all you want is a participation trophy and no one to tell you how to do better, sure.
I don’t see the point in that, but I do see a point to honest feedback.
I don’t give a fuck about the opinions of people with evil priorities. They’re wrong and need to lose, end of!
Morality is not relative.
Morality is definitely relative, there’s just some common overlaps
Sometimes the answer is just the same no matter what (coherent) moral framework you examine it through… Sometimes it’s just that simple
Sometimes people’s priorities, needs, and desires are bad.
“Journalists” still love Twitter because they don’t need to do any real investigative work anymore, they just report on “he said, she said” idiocy. Instant drama and source of clicks.
So much of news these days seem to be “someone said something (on Twitter)”.
Gossip generation…
If you had bothered to read the article, you would know this isn’t actually the gotcha you think it is.
I did read the article. It’s a bunch of whinging and rationalization as she furiously tries to paper over the real reason she refuses to quit Twitter — her precious 70k followers. That’s all that matters to these journalists.
Twitter should just merge with Truth Social at this point. So that way people will know what kind of platform they are engaging with.
Oh boy, what a marvelous idea. This could save the tanking DJT stock and allow them to prolong the scam. It would allow Trump to close the Truth Social scam with a seemingly sensible move. Elon is supposed to be in his cabinet anyway. It’s perfect.
I won’t even click on links to Twitter anymore. I had an account in the beginning but even back then the signal to noise ratio was stupid low. Now It’s all bots and nazis.
But we don’t need a government to step in and tell us to stop using X; we could do that on our own. Brazilians, Twitterless, have been migrating to Bluesky, which was set up in 2019 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Bluesky’s Wang described on Monday “a wild ride even in the last four days. As of this morning, we’ve had nearer 2 million new users.” If we all did that (I’ve done that!), would it obliterate X’s power? Or would there just be a bifurcation, a Good Place and a Bad Place?
Bluesky serves a similar purpose to X but is designed completely differently, as Wang describes: “No single entity has control over the platform, all the code is open-sourced, anyone can copy and paste our entire code. We can’t own your data, you can take it wherever you want. We have to win your usership through our performance or else you will leave. That’s much more like how search engines work. If you enshittify the search engine by placing ads everywhere, people will go to a different search engine.”
The main hurdle has been that people migrate in packs and until recently weren’t migrating fast enough. If they do, and Saperia is right, Bluesky and Threads (which now has 175 million active monthly users), will ultimately supplant X. Will it be the same? It can’t be – the free-for-all of the open web, from which Twitter created its famous “town square” discursive experience (anyone could chat, and look, the Coastguard Agency and CNN were also right there) has been replaced by a social media idea Saperia calls the “dark forest” and Wang describes as “you find your people in small spaces, and work together to build an experience that you want – basic human building blocks of interaction”.
I understand the argument that all the “good” people leaving X will only amplify the voices of the “bad” people on the platform, but alternatives like Bluesky won’t survive if no one uses them. So ultimately I would say that the more ethical choice is to leave X and support a better competitor rather than stay and prolong its legitimacy. It’s not a perfect solution and will further segment society in the short-term but I don’t see how remaining on X contributes to a better future.
People want an easy “fight” to feel like they’re doing something.
They don’t understand that if all the “good people” left twitter, the right wingers would fight each other
Staying on Twitter just gives them all a common enemy and unites them, leaving fractures them.
So just fucking leave.
It’s a waste of time to argue with fascists anyway.
Don’t feed the trolls
For a lot of people the only reason they’re on social media is the slap fights
They don’t care about or know about half the shit they argue about, they just want to argue about something.
I block a lot of people once it becomes apparent that’s what they’re doing.
Rory Stewart did a three-part podcast series on arguing earlier this year that explored this phenomenon. You might find it interesting.
Musk and no, anyone still using it is fine with its issues
Well I mean everybody abandoned ship when musky took over, and then as he was shooting holes in the bottom of the boat, even more people left. Then he started giving priority access to the top deck for anyone who would pay for the privilege. Now the boat is half filled with water and still flooding. Honestly I’m a surprised that the boiler hasn’t exploded by now, what with how much of the engineering staff he fired. I think the only people keeping that thing running are the ones who literally just can’t escape.
Before WW1 many people left the area because they didn’t want anything to do with war. The area became more “hawkish” let’s say. Before WW2 many people left the area because they didn’t want anything to do with ANOTHER war. Also, some of them were literally being persecuted. The remaining people trended towards a certain persuasion.
When Elmo bought Xwitter people left. Guess who remained? When he invited the racists back, guess who remained? When he invited the banned people back, guess who remained?
Xwitter has always been shit, but when you cut the corn and peanuts out it’s all shit.
While I agree with absolutely everything in the article, Twitter was already quite bad before Musk, at least for the end user.
The platform excels at letting people shout into an echo chamber, and is easily falling into opinion pits. The fall of Twitter was an inevitability frankly, Musk merely sped things up.
Honestly, I think the idea of echo chamber style social media is slowly on the way out, they have way too much bad PR for way too long to be sustainable anymore, or maybe that’s me being positive.
Either way, social media will be changing, for better or worse within the next few years.
