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The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

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Re: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

#31

Post by glonq »

Way back in the BBS era I learned "Do not feed the trolls", but I'm not sure that this rule applies to lonely restless insomniac megalomaniac multibillionaires hopped up on ketamine.

I love the idea that starving Musk of attention might inspire him to go fuck off and pursue some chill offline hobbies like fishing or needlepoint. But he's being groomed by this new breed of narcissistic conservatives who pattern themselves off of 1980's-era WWF wrestling heels, so the harder you try to ignore him the harder he will try to get more attention.

The best I can do is boycott Twitter/X so that he suffers the sting of a $44B folly.

Re: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

#32

Post by SenAnder »

hypeit wrote: post #12

I stopped using Twitter as soon as Musk bought it precisely for moral reasons. I'm not going to help someone who wrongly accuses people of being pedophiles make more money. There are of course many, many, many other moral reasons to not support Musk but the pedophile incident is so cut and dry that there was moral (non-partisan) reason to bail on day 1 of Musk ownership.

Let me preface everything by saying following your moral compass is good, even if you do it inconsistently, and even if that inconsistency is biased. It is unambiguously better to do something good when motivated, even if you didn't do something that would have been even better, and just as easy for you. In other words, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

In 2019, the Twitter executive for the Middle East, Gordon MacMillan, was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit [1,2]. Despite this revelation, Twitter at the time defended his employment, and did not fire him. I don't know if Musk kept him or not.

The Iraq war (which predates Twitter, but is the kind of operation a Middle East psyops unit would try to sell to the public, and the risk of further US/UK-led wars in the area is high) is responsible for about 460k deaths [3].

But perhaps you were simply unaware, as the story was mostly ignored by the media [4]. Searching "Gordon MacMillan site:url" finds no relevant articles on theguardian.com, bbc.com, bbc.co.uk, nytimes.com, cnn.com, msnbc.com, latimes.com, theatlantic.com, washingtonpost.com, or foxnews.com

[1] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-pa...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-executive-revealed-psyops-s...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

[4] https://fair.org/home/media-ignore-unmasking-of-twitter-exec...

Re: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

#33

Post by cratermoon »

glonq wrote: post #31

Way back in the BBS era I learned "Do not feed the trolls", but I'm not sure that this rule applies to lonely restless insomniac megalomaniac multibillionaires hopped up on ketamine. I love the idea that starving Musk of attention might inspire him to go fuck off and pursue some chill offline hobbies like fishing or needlepoint. But he's being groomed by this new breed of narcissistic conservatives who pattern themse…

I was there, and I remember "Do not feed the trolls". It worked OK in smaller communities, where the moderators (BBS admins) could kick the Nazis out of the bar before it became a Nazi bar, and nobody was trying to look good on their next quarterly report so the shareholders would earn money.

We also learned, within a decade or two, that if you just ignored the trolls and did nothing else, they would bring their troll friends and engage in coordinated, ideology-driven trolling, and then you had the Nazi bar problem.

Re: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

#34

Post by rsynnott »

The practical case - it's very annoying and broken.

(Like, I fled for largely moral reasons last November, but by January it was unusable for practical reasons anyway, with the death of third party clients and the promotion of insufferable blueticks in front of proper replies.)

Re: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

#35

Post by freejazz »

grecy wrote: post #24

I am confused why people care so much, and spend so much time convicing others of their position about Twitter/X It's just a private company running a website. They come and go like myspace, tumblr and whatever else. One day nobody will use Facebook or Reddit. Why are people so caught up personally and emotionally about a single one going to crap? Use it if you like it, and stop using it if you don't. It seems extrem…

>I am confused why people care so much, and spend so much time convicing others of their position about Twitter/X

Because it's a controversial debate in mainstream discourse - how disconnected from other people are you that this is something that confuses you?

Does it surprise you that people have positions on abortion? On whether or not PublicFigureXYZ did something bad? Does it surprise you that people talk about the weather too??

Re: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

#36

Post by MiguelX413 »

SenAnder wrote: post #32
hypeit wrote: post #12

I stopped using Twitter as soon as Musk bought it precisely for moral reasons. I'm not going to help someone who wrongly accuses people of being pedophiles make more money. There are of course many, many, many other moral reasons to not support Musk but the pedophile incident is so cut and dry that there was moral (non-partisan) reason to bail on day 1 of Musk ownership.

Let me preface everything by saying following your moral compass is good, even if you do it inconsistently, and even if that inconsistency is biased. It is unambiguously better to do something good when motivated, even if you didn't do something that would have been even better, and just as easy for you. In other words, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. In 2019, the Twitter executive for the Middle East, Gordon…

There were always reasons to not use Twitter, which is why I never did.

Re: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

#37

Post by freejazz »

willcipriano wrote: post #6
bluefishinit wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is he a capitalist though? He lit "his" capital on fire to buy and ruin Twitter. It seems like his goals are mostly political. He bought the site so he could push his far-right ideology. His recent trip to the border supports that. It does nothing but alienate customers and advertisers, yet he did it anyway. Same with his constant whining about trans people, that's not a business decision, it's a far-right ideologica…

I was referring to Bloomberg. When corporations start to take moral stances always ask, cui bono?

Well, you might want to inform yourself what an editorial section is before you make this leap

Re: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

#38

Post by martindbp »

worksonmine wrote: post #29
grecy wrote: post #24

I am confused why people care so much, and spend so much time convicing others of their position about Twitter/X It's just a private company running a website. They come and go like myspace, tumblr and whatever else. One day nobody will use Facebook or Reddit. Why are people so caught up personally and emotionally about a single one going to crap? Use it if you like it, and stop using it if you don't. It seems extrem…

I think people are just disappointed that their beloved bubble is now controlled by the opposition. Musk went from god to devil in these circles in a very short time. Meanwhile I've never cared about either and am just trying to understand the mass hysteria. Twitter was a cesspool a decade ago, just that they didn't notice because they agreed with the bullshit.

It's not a cesspool. It's exactly what you make of it. If I had to pick one social network from them all (HN, Reddit, FB, IG, excluding messaging services like WhatsApp/Signal) I would pick X every day. It's the only place where I know the the information is coming from a reputable source, because I follow people at the top of their fields.

Re: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

#39

Post by buzzlite »

hypeit wrote: post #12

I stopped using Twitter as soon as Musk bought it precisely for moral reasons. I'm not going to help someone who wrongly accuses people of being pedophiles make more money. There are of course many, many, many other moral reasons to not support Musk but the pedophile incident is so cut and dry that there was moral (non-partisan) reason to bail on day 1 of Musk ownership.

Same. plus Tesla.

Re: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X

#40

Post by WorldMaker »

bootlooped wrote: post #14
hypeit wrote: post #12

I stopped using Twitter as soon as Musk bought it precisely for moral reasons. I'm not going to help someone who wrongly accuses people of being pedophiles make more money. There are of course many, many, many other moral reasons to not support Musk but the pedophile incident is so cut and dry that there was moral (non-partisan) reason to bail on day 1 of Musk ownership.

An argument that someone could make, although maybe it's a bit logically suspect, is that Twitter is losing money for every user, and using Twitter is costing Musk more money than it's generating for him.

Given how much "X" has put into sandbagging and crippling the logged out user experience, it might make a lot more sense to keep using Twitter but only in logged out views because the signal "X" is sending is that is truly costing them a lot of money they are acting like they can't afford. (It truly is terrible now: no thread views, weird full screen ads, random reCAPTCHAs.)

(I feel like a hipster on this discussion, I stopped using Twitter way back in 2016 before it was cool when I saw it's retweet/quote-tweet tools used to launder targeted misinformation from its terrible personalized ad networks all being abused as a cynical political tool. It was terrible before Musk got involved. "X" is a lot worse, but the downhill started years before, according to this early Twitter adopter.)

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