Sunday, November 24, 2024

The Great Twitter Skedaddle of 2024

If there's any positives in the wake of the disastrous 2024 election results, it's that a lot of people on social media are voting with their feet and fleeing Elon Musk's Twitter (stop calling everything X, you moron) in droves (via Luca Ittimani at the Guardian US): 

Social media platform Bluesky has picked up more than 1 million new users since the US election, as users seek to escape misinformation and offensive posts on X.

The influx, largely from North America and the UK, has helped Bluesky reach nearly 15 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company said.

Social media researcher Axel Bruns said the platform offered an alternative to X, formerly Twitter, including a more effective system for blocking or suspending problematic accounts and policing harmful behaviour.

“It’s become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else,” he said.

What had happened since Musk's hostile buyout of Twitter is that Musk brought back a lot of the Far Right - even Nazi-fueled - vitriol under the excuse of "free speech". Not only did Musk gut the staffing needed to manage the social media environs, he also gutted many of the protections that the app had put in place to protect users from harassment and direct attacks. Indeed, one of the truly last straws that drove people away from Twitter is a rule change Musk enforced on blocking that effectively made the tool useless.

When Musk bought Twitter back in 2022, I questioned - and found my own answer - why a billionaire was so desperate to waste $44 billion like that:

Forget the line he's trying to sell to the public about his interest in Twitter. This is not about encouraging free speech, or bringing his "brand" of innovation to improve security or service to a cornerstone of global social media. No, what Elon Musk is doing is Buying speech, there is nothing FREE about what he's doing. From here it's looking like Musk wants control over one of the many social networks that have openly derided his - and other billionaires' - obsessions with space travel, his self-marketing overkill, his lack of genuine philanthropy, his business model of racism in his workplaces, and more.

Musk's call for a more open Twitter runs the serious risk of creating an environment of lax rules governing online behavior. Twitter already has problems with online harassers, raging haters, and sociopathic doxxers looking to bully and threaten people because of their gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and/or political beliefs. Musk is poised to make things worse...

Well, now it's post-election 2024 and we have a clear answer: Musk spent all that money so he could campaign for donald trump, pushing lie after lie on his own account(s) to prop up trump's chances, and gaslighting a low-information electorate into voting for the goddamned rapist/felon. Musk alone didn't win the election for trump, but he clearly assisted in the damage done.

And so with that, whatever counts as a liberal/progressive audience within Twitter is bolting for the lifeboats to head over to Bluesky.

There are other social media apps similar to Twitter that people already set up accounts; such as Facebook Threads, Counter Social, and Spoutible. Bluesky quickly became the destination of choice because they set up an effective blocking system that can prevent the more hostile and deceptive Far Right trolls from gaining any audience there.

The Far Right "Free Speechers" are already complaining about the blocks - "Waah, you're denying me my right to be heard" - but for all that the First Amendment represents there should be an individual's right to NOT LISTEN TO YOUR BULLSHIT. We have the freedom to peaceably assemble with like-minded persons, and the haters do not have a right to bulldoze their way in and shout at everybody until we surrender to their hate.

We don't want to listen to your gaslighting fearmongering, Nazis, and you can't make us.

As for myself, I kept saying I was leaving Twitter after Musk bought it out, but I kept getting dragged back in because like a fool I wanted to stick around and document the atrocities. Well, no longer. I don't owe Musk or any of the haters that took over Twitter another second of my time. So I downloaded an archive for the last time, waiting until I got the ZIP file, and then parted ways with Twitter with a final salute to the goddamn billionaire who ruined it all:

Both barrels, motherfucker

No regrets, America.

See you on Bluesky at @paulwartenberg.bsky.social 

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