Derek Powazek 🐐Nov 20, 2023

Elon routinely interacted with and retweeted nazis on Twitter long before he bought it. After, he fired the content safety staff and courted nazis who had been banned and put them back on the site. Earlier this year he started PAYING THEM to keep posting.

It's nice that people are noticing his nazi shit now, but it's a journalistic malpractice that it's taken this long and most omit this history.

This WaPo story is the exception: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/19/antisemiticism-internet-elon-musk-israel-war/

Antisemitism was rising online. Then Elon Musk’s X supercharged it.

Antisemitism has long festered on the internet, but the Israel-Gaza war and the loosening of content moderation on X have propelled it to unprecedented levels.

The Washington Post
Show threadkatch wreckNov 20, 2023
@fraying my guess is the new investors want it to be rearchitected as a culture war promotion tool, and these antics are part of fulfilling that mandate
Show threadDerek Powazek 🐐Nov 20, 2023
@katchwreck who cares what they want. I just want it to die.
Show threadkatch wreckNov 20, 2023
@fraying now that they see it working as intended, as long as powerful people see it as a tool for waging their political warfare, they will keep pumping money into it to keep it alive, is my guess. polarization is part of their strategy
Show threadDerek Powazek 🐐
@katchwreck again, who cares? It does us no good to cast our minds into the motivations of sociopaths.
Nov 20, 2023 at 2:12amWeb
Show threadkatch wreckNov 20, 2023
@fraying well, you posted about it abd said you want it to die, so it seems to me like you care :-P the point of my hypothesis was to predict that it will not die simply because of lost ad revenues
Show threadDerek Powazek 🐐Nov 20, 2023
@katchwreck don’t need to divine their intentions to know it needs to die.
Show threadkatch wreckNov 20, 2023
@fraying perhaps it's not necessary, but understanding can be useful in controlling an outcome. was worried you thought it might die soon on it's own, thought it might help to consider a less optimistic timescale in order to avoid unreasonable expectations! remember when it was an SMS microblogging service? seems like there's not much left of its original form... a full metamorphosis that could be worthy of study as a historical case of how monetization efforts lead to undesirable ends
Show threadDerek Powazek 🐐Nov 20, 2023
@katchwreck but it has nothing to do with any of that. And it will never be free again. It’s already dead.