The Fall Of Twitter (Bluesky lists ahoy)

I can't help but feel he's done a lot of damage to that cause.

Back in the day, when there was a news story about a government trying to force Twitter to remove some posts, it tended to be some despotic regime and some post that was embarrassing to them. And I was on Twitter's side.

Dorsey was from a similar "All speech should be free!" mindset (as are a lot of these tech bro CEOs), but at least even he understood the need to have some kind of moderation and a hint of corporate responsibility.

But Musk's extremist behavior has essentially forced a lot of moderate governments into trying to deal with Twitter, which then gives cover to the despotic ones when they do the same.

It's a lot harder to argue for absolute freedom of speech when he's there amplifying so much harmful content.

It sounds like Telegram and TikTok can be just as bad, but I'm not exposed to those.

I honestly would argue that its a governments duty to police speech on social media to at least some degree or at the very least ensure there is parity of consequence between doing something online and doing it IRL.

I dunno. I just remember that the Indian government wanted some tweets removed a few years ago, on account of those tweets supporting protests against the government. Twitter said no, and that's exactly what they should have said.

I get wanting to police bad speech. If you could do that in a way that won't enable the suppression of legitimate protest, I'm all for it! But it's a tricky business.

putting a marker down, my bet is he'll be dead within a decade. because he believes that the richest man in the world is the rightful ruler of the world he'll fund some coup attempt - ala Mark Thatcher - in a small country whose government doesn't do as he says and be on the ground just as it fails and be summarily, violently, dealt with by a military junta

Yeah, they should have said no. But if the same Indian government had told them to take down some tweet calling for someone to be lynched, then Twitter should have said yes. If they didn't, the Indian government should have taken some action against them. But ideally Twitter would have detected and blocked such a tweet before it even got to that stage. 

Of course, there's an entire scale from supporting peaceful protest to calling for people to be killed, or other illegal activity, and there is a whole scale of governments. 

But I can't help but think that if these giant social media platforms had reasonable global policies on what they would tolerate, and policed them effectively, then they'd have a lot firmer ground to stand on when they did deny such a request. 
Plus the world might be a less shitty place. 

Not that such systems and policies are easy, as Facebook's flailing and failures have shown. But at least they kinda tried, as did old Twitter, whereas X is just a wild west free for all. 

At some point he'll either start to believe he can fly on the power of his own farts and plummet to a particularly smelly death, or he'll end up getting neurolinked into a Superman III style monstrosity the tax payer will need to pay to keep alive.

I see he's put up an AI generated image of Kamala Harris wearing a communist looking outfit with "I can't believe she's worn this!" so that's great, that's a nice sign of where political discourse is gonna go.

Similarly someone made an image of him and Trump kissing while wearing Nazi regalia which has since been flagged, surprise.

First time seeing a lot of Cybertrucks in rl while visiting friends in Nashville and omg they are hideous. The fact that people are actively choosing to spend $140k on these metal buckets is nearly as much proof as the Trump superstore on the freeway to the Smoky Mountains that yes a reasonable proportion of Americans are batsh*t crazy lol!

If anyone other than his cult is in doubt about him being a (pro-apartheid, white supremacist pro eugenics, pro misogyny, ableist) FUCKING NAZI at this point then they need to read about 7 of his tweets

Absolutely cannot choose between him, Netanyahu, Trump and Putin for a horrifically painful, bowel voiding, eye bleeding and very extended embolism (assuming I only get one wish)

Can I have three more wishes plz

Genies are bastards as I recall

www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/sep/05/advertiser-exodus-x-survey-2025-elon-musk

It's absolutely fucked

"An X spokesperson said: “Advertisers know that X now offers stronger brand safety, performance and analytics capabilities than ever before, while seeing all-time-high levels of usage."

Wow - I hadn't realised quite how much a relatively low level user with 'just' 90k followers could earn... They not only enable these people, they effectively employ them.