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.
@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.
Dan Gillmor
Christoph Mergerson
George William Herbert