I'm not sure if any further proof were needed, but: there's a community of people who often show up in my Twitter search feed.
They post *a lot* - a constant stream of raging about immigration, islamophobia, random slurs and, well, a fair proportion of "getting catfished by an account purporting to be a young woman from Liverpool who loves sex as much as they love football and racism" ...
Some of them have been excitedly looking forward to the Musk era of Twitter, when everything would be free, Trump would return, and they would be able to post as much shit as they like without the threat of the "shadowban" or the interference of "woke lefties".
It was interesting to see how quickly they forgot about this when he arrived and they continued to get moderated on a daily basis ...
But getting banned isn't a huge disincentive for this kind of poster. The lifecycle is quite short: they buy a new SIM card to verify a new account, shout loudly to their mates about how they've been banned and it's all the fault of X, Y and Z who are killing this country, post for about two weeks.. and then get banned again.
And so, entirely predictably, this morning I see one has bought a blue tick.
And I guess now his RTs of badly spelled anti-immigration memes that have been bouncing around Facebook groups for years will now get priority in search?
Great stuff. Just great.
@tom @tom Honestly, I can see Twitter just self-imploding in the next couple of years. Between blue-ticked bigots and the ship no longer (reportedly) properly being maintained due to exiled engineers, Musk's whims etc.
Keeping my profile on there for now, but I don't know how long for. Personally been finding a calmer, more productive and hugely less anxiety-inducing existence in my adopted part of the Fedi.
Tom Royal
Abhijit
kevinpocock 🌳