131–140 of 834 posts
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“Free speech” disappeared almost immediately after the Twitter purchase. Along with all of Musks supporters changing from “we need free speech”, to “Musk owns the platform, he can do what he wants.” Pre-Musk Twitter was more about free speech, except it was trying to fight bots, hate speech and disinformation.
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Everyone reading this -- sign up for Bluesky, help it build up a larger network effect, so it can outcompete X. It already has 30m users.
Who owns bsky? What prevents a random billionaire to buy it and use it their election platform? Mastodon just feels as a safer bet...
At best it's less toxic, but only marginally. They implemented even more dunk mechanisms that X has, so it's primed to be a terrible place long-term.
User-owned, federated social media is absolutely the safest bet if you want low toxicity and freedom from corporate control.
Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors? And remember how Elon bought Twitter, loudly proclaiming he was doing so to defend free speech? I'm mildly curious to see how X tries to justify this, but I suspect they've reached the stage where they don't even need to pretend to pay lip service to their notional values.
>Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors? The Arab spring was a populist uprising. It's not clear that there were actually positive outcomes; just increased geopolitical instability. Twitter has always been a social media platform, and definitionally it has therefore always increased extremism and populism. I find it incredibly disheartening that…
So your assertion that "Twitter was _never_ a net positive for anyone" is not only false but an absurdly biased and frankly wrong view on how the world accesses information.
Also, the Arab spring overthrew several decades-long brutal dictatorships. Given that overthrowing The Taliban (lol) and Saddam is hailed as a positive of the trillions of dollars and millions of lives spent on the GWOT, at least give the people of the Middle East the courtesy of acknowledging the overthrow of Ben Ali, Assad, Mubarak and Gaddafi.
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Who owns bsky? What prevents a random billionaire to buy it and use it their election platform? Mastodon just feels as a safer bet...
bsky is decentralized, in theory more so than Mastodon, which is federated (a variant of decentralization that requires you to trust the server admins of a server of your choice) "In theory", because so far, there are very few nodes (one?), very few (if any?) alternative implementations, most is controlled and operated by a small team paid for by a.o. Jack Dorsey and other funds. Mastodon (using the ActivityPub proto…
I wouldn't let that stop you from signing up for bluesky -- in my experience it is definitely the best of the options for a twitter alternative -- but you should know exactly what it is you're getting into before you get into it.
And if you want to know exactly what you're getting into with bluesky, you should read this, which tells you more than you really want to know: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors? And remember how Elon bought Twitter, loudly proclaiming he was doing so to defend free speech? I'm mildly curious to see how X tries to justify this, but I suspect they've reached the stage where they don't even need to pretend to pay lip service to their notional values.
>Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors? The Arab spring was a populist uprising. It's not clear that there were actually positive outcomes; just increased geopolitical instability. Twitter has always been a social media platform, and definitionally it has therefore always increased extremism and populism. I find it incredibly disheartening that…
What has happened since is the old order has mostly reasserted itself - with a clamp down on social media, and mechanisms put in place to cut access if things get too fiesty.
Take Egypt - they kicked out a miltary juntu - forced elections - then the 'wrong' people won the elections and the military took over again, clamped down on the media and are in still in place today ( president has been in power for 10+ years with no signs of stepping down ) - and they are so representative of the people that the US think they might be able to persuade the Egyptian leader to take part in ethnic cleansing of it's neighbour.
Whether that's a good thing depends on whether you think people like el-Sisi know what's best for their country, whether the people agree or not.
Instagram blocked telegram 8 years ago and nobody complained, the ban in still in place as far i know; trying to block the competition is fairly common, unfortunately
Given that Telegram has very publicly failed at that kind of moderation, it is pretty defensible to block it. If only they would do something about the weirdo Instagram mommies that flood the network with pictures of their preteen daughters in swimsuit and leotards... It's gross what some people do for anything resembling Internet clout.
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> If I own a platform I’m not under any obligation to allow you to say whatever you like on that platform This is complicated massively by Elon's role at DOGE. Twitter has the right to block whomever they want (and always did). But given "multiple federal workers...said they’ve moved sensitive conversations from text messages and Facebook Messenger to the encrypted messaging app Signal" [1], it's unclear whether this…
Isn't it fucking crazy that the world's richest person is also moonlighting a public office with massive conflicts of interest and virtually zero oversight? What the fuck is this timeline, is nothing serious anymore?? It's really not so long ago that this would be considered completely bonkers and something you would see on a "banana republic".
Trump team has said that Musk will self-determine conflict of interest when gutting govt. agencies.
It is lost on them that self-determination of conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest.
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You’re reading too much into it. Stop thinking he’s playing 5D chess, he’s not even playing regular checkers. It’s well known he bought Twitter because he thought he would be forced to, he clearly tried to actively back out of the purchase. https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/12/elon-musk-admits-he-only-b...
OTOH, I recall Elon's comment about "vote Dem in House and GOP in Senate, divided is better", something like that. Given his position as Donald's right hand man, that comment takes on new meaning.
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> If I own a platform I’m not under any obligation to allow you to say whatever you like on that platform. Before the Internet this was not the case. In Marsh v. Alabama, it was ruled (in line with all previous precedent) that privately owned roadways and sidewalks had to allow religious pamphleters, even though it is private property. The court asserted that anywhere that is the forum for public discussion is de fac…
The country is currently massively pushing for violent conflict abroad...
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>Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors? The Arab spring was a populist uprising. It's not clear that there were actually positive outcomes; just increased geopolitical instability. Twitter has always been a social media platform, and definitionally it has therefore always increased extremism and populism. I find it incredibly disheartening that…
At least at the time, we thought it could be a tool for populist uprisings in authoritarian countries. Now it seems like they just want to promote populist uprisings in democratic countries.