What Musk is doing at Twitter right now is clearly a demonstration of power -- that is, his ability to be a capricious dictator of the platform he controls. He is the opposite of a benevolent dictator. He is fomenting extremism and hatred, and mocking his always obvious lie about believing in freedom of expression. He and Twitter are a clear and present danger to the rest of us.
Friends should be telling friends to stop supporting this increasingly evil man and company. Now.
Tried to update my Twitter profile (which already says to find me here) to be clear that I'm done posting and reading there.
Update was rejected because Musk and his minions now want you to believe mentioning and/or linking to my Mastodon account constitutes "malware".
He's panicking, which is good.
He still controls one of the most important media companies in the world, which is bad.
NASA and other government agencies doing business with Musk should be thinking hard, right now, about what kind of person they're doing the public's business with.
Meanwhile, anyone who bought stock in Tesla during the past year should be cursing the name Musk.
Any journalist or news organization remaining on Twitter is now participating in Musk's mockery of free speech.
You cannot have this one both ways, journalists. You are with him, and his rancid extremism, or you are not.
Please choose to do the right thing for yourselves, if no one else.
Similarly, government agencies that remain on Twitter are endorsing a company that increasingly promotes extremism and demonstrates contempt for fundamental principles of democracy.
Maybe that's fine for Florida's regime. It should not be for most governments, especailly the federal government.
@dangillmor There is little doubt that Musk is a jackass. BUT he is also a user.
I don't follow his feed closely. I've seen some stupid stuff he's RTed and Tweeted. But beyond the pale in the public square of an open society? I haven't seen any. Do you have an example in mind?
As to racist or anti-Semitic speech, I've seen ONE example so far post Musk take-over. I'm not at all sure that is a higher rate than normal.
On the other hand I follow mostly fairly sane people.
@jimrutt @dangillmor The problem is not "new" ideas. It's that he's been actively bringing back promoters of racism, anti-trans and anti-lgbt bigotry and outright fascism.
My goto for comments like yours is to point to Popper's Paradox of Intolerance - tolerating the intolerant is the surest way to destroy tolerance.
@jimrutt @dangillmor As a last resort he argues for outright criminalisation and use of force.
The same arguments, however, equally applies to countering these ideas in milder ways before it gets to that point, to avoid it getting to that point.
We can wait and apply force and use of violence to suppress fascists, or we can deprive them of convenient platforms today and try to prevent it from getting far enough for force to be necessary.
I know what my choice is.
@vidar @dangillmor Your argument of course isn't Popper's, so please stop referencing Popper to support your own views. That's kind of dishonest. Just say it's your view.
While fascism is one of the bad attractors that our system could fall into, it's Chinese style Neo-fascism I'd be more concerned about than the mentally defective loser sorts that populate the tiny American fascist fringe. I'd also rank Peter Thielist neo-feudalism as a higher risk and neo-Dark ages theocracy.
I have made multiple arguments. One of which is that you're using a classically fascist/nazi argument when you brought in "cultural integrity".
I'm going to block you now as I have no interest in arguing with someone pushing fascist argument as if they have any validity the way you just did.
Vile.
To be clear, given the argument you put forward, I consider you *part of* the "loser sorts that populate the tiny American fascist fringe".
@jimrutt @dangillmor Yes, I am sure, and I am also sure that equivocating on opposition to bigotry itself is vile.
That you only "strongly suspect" they are wrong to me is the kind of moral relativism which has time and time again allowed oppressors to flourish.
It's only marginally better than support for the bigotry.
@jimrutt @dangillmor I don't need "reproducible data" to decide that oppression and discrimination and harming other people is bad. I only need to see the harm.
That you're trying to "both sides" bigotry and harm to other people as something to dispassionately analyse from the distance makes you a nasty apologist for bigotry.
Oh, look, full mask off into using fascist arguments for cultural purity.
No, in that case it's sane to argue that they lost out due to an unwillingness to brutally suppress the authoritarian regimes with force before they got the power.
The moment you argue for tolerating oppression in case not doing so damages the purity of your society you've just bought into fascism.
@mergerson @dangillmor There are real site stability questions about Twitter already. It should not be relied upon.
Some communities such as emergency services and safety information have a better case for staying there as long as some users remain, but should be getting alternative communication channels ready.
@georgewherbert @dangillmor The question isn’t whether there should be redundancies. It’s whether lots of people will be harmed if government agencies like emergency agencies simply decide to not use that online network and the communities it has fostered. They definitely will be.
And federal agencies move at a glacial pace at adopting new social media. So you’d destroy a value method of reaching people to virtue signal.
@mergerson @dangillmor Hypothetically, what do you do if Twitter stops working tonight? What’s lost and has to be rebuilt?
You need to be thinking that way.
The next step is to assess approximately “what if I had residual users on eg Gab right now?” And follow that logic.
@mergerson @dangillmor Fox TV meteorologists are good local weather reporters.
But this situation resembles if hypothetically Murdoch stopped paying electricity bills at local stations and broadcast towers, fired 90% of broadcast engineer staff, and was unbolting TV broadcast tower guy wires arguing that the structural redundancy of multiple wires was an unnecessary luxury expense. *Those* meteorologists, no matter how professional, can’t then be relied upon.
@mergerson @dangillmor Twitter has literally laid off upwards of 80%, reputedly now 90% of site operations and reliability engineers (SREs, etc). Direct analogy to the broadcast engineers at TV or radio keeping the RF equipment and signal feeds working.
Twitter has literally stopped paying bills including network, datacenter, and electricity bills for office and technical locations such as datacenters, and started turning some datacenters off to lower costs.
@mergerson Replicating what they do on Twitter is not difficult. Redirecting people from there is not hard. It won't be an overnight fix. But it is necessary.
There's a limited number of radio stations in any geographical area, which is a different situation.
@dangillmor I can't get my undergraduates to read email and we're going to easily shift people's social media behavior?
Are online communities transferable?
@christina @mergerson @dangillmor
Canvas announcements which bounce to email.
That being said, I *never* use canvas conversations, they must email me.
Overwhelmingly though, the best peer communication tool for damn near everything is discord.
Thanks!
Discord is pretty overwhelming, but I’m there anyway. It’s certainly got some gravity. Pretty realtime chat, though. Hard to keep up if I ignore it for a while.
Good points all around, though right now seems like "stay and fight" is smartest.
@Incognitim @mergerson @dangillmor
This is pretty much the best advice about dang near anything
@dangillmor The problem isn’t that journalists and agencies are on the platform generating data. The problem is that advertisers are willing to pay him for that data despite the reporting across platforms about what’s happening. Advertisers do not have a responsibility to spend on every platform, but we - #journalists - should feel responsible for fighting misinformation on the biggest platforms.
@ianhillmedia
You may well understand our frustration but I think you underestimate the bitter taste left in our mouths from what’s been wrought.
If all <that> destruction isn’t enough to make you look around and wonder why you are still there? If seeing what type of activity he himself has engaged in isn’t enough to persuade you social media must surely be more that that, especially if one wants to be taken seriously?
I wouldn’t want the association, myself. Not as a journalist.
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