The Twitter madness
Recently I’m getting a little sick of social media again. I barely use Twitter at this point. It doesn’t really do much in terms of Twitter shit, because half of my Mastodon feed is Elon this (or Egon), and Elon that. The frustration that comes from it led me to writing this post.
The straw that broke the camel’s back, is this Tweet by Elton John:
Misinformation flourishing unchecked… He doesn’t use Facebook either, right? Or does he?
What really irritates me is that for some reason people are willing to trust a private company to decide what is misinformation and what is not. Even the governments fail at that. It was a big thing when COVID started, that certain opinions that it originates from a certain lab, were axed as misinformation, accounts were banned, but then suddenly some of government announcements got marked as misinformation. Although no one was banned. And I believe no one was unbanned either.
A video by Alec Bostwick explains it very well. This one is specifically about YouTube, but you can get a good idea.
Meanwhile, Facebook doesn’t give a flying duck about misinformation as long as it makes people scroll the site longer.
And now, Elton John, and loads of Twitter and Mastodon users parrot this notion that Twitter should tell you what is misinformation or what is not. The truth is, should they be wrong about something - which they would for sure be - it would lead to even more harmful misinformation.
Misinformation should be eradicated organically, not arbitrarily filtered.
The rage about Elon Musk allowing ‘nazis’ is another cane of worms.
I believe Twitter still doesn’t allow harassment, and illegal content, like death threats, calling for violence and sharing of some heinous media. So, is allowing people with unpopular, wrong or harmful opinions on a site that is supposed to be ‘global marketplace’ a bad thing? I don’t think so. They still would be punished for breaking TOS or law itself. I feel like people just don’t want people they disagree with there.
So, what they actually want to do is deplatform people that have other views. They complain about ‘fascists’ being allowed on the site now, but axing views not fitting the general agenda seems pretty ‘fascist’ to me.
And the outcome of this is existence of sites that exclusively consist of these ‘rejects’, which allows or even makes them radicalize themselves even more, because no one tells them they are wrong. There is no discussion, no exchange of ideas. Only validation of one’s world view, which often is very wrong or misguided.
And Twitter DMs were never secure, they were never end-to-end encrypted, and they always could have been read by someone. And apparently they weren’t given to some right wing reporters. Should we trust this statement? I don’t think so. As long as DMs aren’t encrypted, we should always assume that they aren’t private, full stop.
Before someone would say that I’m some kind of Elon’s fanboy - because of course, you can either be Elon’s fanboy or Elon’s hater, there’s nothing in between - I do think Elon is, maybe not necessarily a moron, but… a billionaire. He lives in a different world, and cannot give a shit about normal people, because he doesn’t understand how to be a normal, regular person anymore. He cannot relate.
He already is on Mars.
That’s why we cannot rely on him or any other billionaire to do the right thing for the masses. Because they don’t know what is good for us. They might think they know, but they are perceiving it from a perspective that most of us would never have.
And even if they could somehow relate, they could still just be wrong.
Twitter was never a pristine site, it was for a long time now, a cesspool, a dumpster fire, and it still is. Pretending that it just got bad beacuse of Rocket Man, is just stupid.
It’s whole another story though.
Now, you can argue with me on Twitter or Mastodon.
See you soon!
Recently I’m getting a little sick of social media again. I barely use Twitter at this point. It doesn’t really do much in terms of Twitter shit, because half of my Mastodon feed is Elon this (or Egon), and Elon that. The frustration that comes from it led me to writing this post.
The straw that broke the camel’s back, is this Tweet by Elton John:
Misinformation flourishing unchecked… He doesn’t use Facebook either, right? Or does he?
What really irritates me is that for some reason people are willing to trust a private company to decide what is misinformation and what is not. Even the governments fail at that. It was a big thing when COVID started, that certain opinions that it originates from a certain lab, were axed as misinformation, accounts were banned, but then suddenly some of government announcements got marked as misinformation. Although no one was banned. And I believe no one was unbanned either.
A video by Alec Bostwick explains it very well. This one is specifically about YouTube, but you can get a good idea.
Meanwhile, Facebook doesn’t give a flying duck about misinformation as long as it makes people scroll the site longer.
And now, Elton John, and loads of Twitter and Mastodon users parrot this notion that Twitter should tell you what is misinformation or what is not. The truth is, should they be wrong about something - which they would for sure be - it would lead to even more harmful misinformation.
Misinformation should be eradicated organically, not arbitrarily filtered.
The rage about Elon Musk allowing ‘nazis’ is another cane of worms.
I believe Twitter still doesn’t allow harassment, and illegal content, like death threats, calling for violence and sharing of some heinous media. So, is allowing people with unpopular, wrong or harmful opinions on a site that is supposed to be ‘global marketplace’ a bad thing? I don’t think so. They still would be punished for breaking TOS or law itself. I feel like people just don’t want people they disagree with there.
So, what they actually want to do is deplatform people that have other views. They complain about ‘fascists’ being allowed on the site now, but axing views not fitting the general agenda seems pretty ‘fascist’ to me.
And the outcome of this is existence of sites that exclusively consist of these ‘rejects’, which allows or even makes them radicalize themselves even more, because no one tells them they are wrong. There is no discussion, no exchange of ideas. Only validation of one’s world view, which often is very wrong or misguided.
And Twitter DMs were never secure, they were never end-to-end encrypted, and they always could have been read by someone. And apparently they weren’t given to some right wing reporters. Should we trust this statement? I don’t think so. As long as DMs aren’t encrypted, we should always assume that they aren’t private, full stop.
Before someone would say that I’m some kind of Elon’s fanboy - because of course, you can either be Elon’s fanboy or Elon’s hater, there’s nothing in between - I do think Elon is, maybe not necessarily a moron, but… a billionaire. He lives in a different world, and cannot give a shit about normal people, because he doesn’t understand how to be a normal, regular person anymore. He cannot relate.
He already is on Mars.
That’s why we cannot rely on him or any other billionaire to do the right thing for the masses. Because they don’t know what is good for us. They might think they know, but they are perceiving it from a perspective that most of us would never have.
And even if they could somehow relate, they could still just be wrong.
Twitter was never a pristine site, it was for a long time now, a cesspool, a dumpster fire, and it still is. Pretending that it just got bad beacuse of Rocket Man, is just stupid.
It’s whole another story though.
Now, you can argue with me on Twitter or Mastodon.
See you soon!