It’s clear to me that Musk purchased twitter in order to destroy it. The blue checkmark is a verification mark for authenticity. This is particularly important in terms of identifying sources. To make it pay-to-play is to burn twitter's reliability as a news source, and it's reliability in general, to the ground.

Then again such social media companies are not, and have never been, a “public forum”. They are privately owned networks that have a single priority: harvesting profits. Primarily from selling their users’ information to those who which to target them. Everything else is secondary. They have shown that they cannot be trusted in any meaningful sense. We deserve much better.

Remember Google Fusion Tables? I spent many months building digital humanities resources around it. One was a WW1 map that identified the final resting place of the over 1,000 people from Limerick who lost their lives in that conflict. The other was a resource that mapped the sites of Collective Punishment of African American communities in the U.S. Many other historians built fantastic resources using it as a way to visually and spatially educate about the past. It was accessible and effective.

Then in 2019 Google erased this product. Just gone forever. I realised then that these companies are the antithesis of libraries, cultural institutions and the open source movement. They see culture, and our free labour in using their (temporary) tools, as instantly and permanently disposable ephemera to attract attention for the purpose of advertising. All that power and wealth put to use to fulfil such an empty mission.

Some further thoughts on my Mastodon experience: it has made me step back and reevaluate how social media should operate. We built entire communities on Twitter but were ultimately treated like a product for trade. It does not have to be like this.

We should demand that our social media platforms reflect and serve their communities rather than exploit them. Currently billion dollar tech companies engage a suite of psychological and algorithmic techniques to manipulate what we see in our feeds to boost advertising metrics. That’s not a conspiracy theory btw, it’s a long established business model.

Mastodon is not a panacea (nor does it claim to be) but it is a non-profit, ad-less, localised and federated social media platform. ‘instances’ are administrated and moderated by volunteers. When the #twitterexodus started yesterday this Irish instance (mastodon.ie) was clearly, and ofc understandably, overwhelmed by the huge influx of new applications and traffic.

The admins reacted quickly, opened an open collective financial contribution page (opencollective.com/mastodonie) and within a couple of hours they had raised enough funds to upgrade the server/service and sustain functionality and speed. And everyone who contributed is now a stakeholder. Because I think we see the potential for a better way to do this. And that community is growing. I also appreciate that Mastodon has decided on an interesting ‘viral dampening’ approach to their UI design.

Twitter has become more and more like a type of outrage engine. In Mastodon there are no quote tweets, the oxygen of the pile-on. The metrics of reshares/likes are also dampened so that they are not prominent at all beneath a post in your feed. It’s a very different place. And I like it.

I think I also forget just how much work it took to make Twitter a bearable place to be. I ended up blocking something like 55,000 different accounts, received death threats, constant trolling, spam, &c. It took years for any semblance of meaningful and consistent moderation to exist. It was in essence a libertarian website that had to dragged kicking towards reform. We had invested so much effort over the years for it to be useful & now it is being torn apart heedlessly at pace. Final straw.