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 

trump Can't Stop from Grifting

Even after getting found liable for multiple acts of business fraud, donald trump can't stop himself running more cons. Just look at the latest lawsuit by his would-be business partners with his personal social media app (via Dan Mangan at CNBC News): 

Former President Donald Trump was accused in a lawsuit on Wednesday of trying to “drastically dilute” the value of stock shares in his social media company held by the firm’s co-founders, potentially depriving them of hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.

The partnership, United Atlantic Ventures, alleges that Trump Media & Technology Group engaged in “wrongful 11th hour … maneuvering” to dilute UAV’s minority stake in the media company, a court filing says.

The Delaware Chancery Court lawsuit comes in advance of the planned merger of TMTG with a shell company called Digital World Acquisition Corp, which would result in the shares of the combined entity being publicly traded.

If DWAC shareholders approve the merger next month, Trump’s 90% stake in TMTG could be valued at more than $3 billion, given DWAC’s current share price...

Dear DWAC shareholders: Don't. A deal with a devil like trump is no deal at all.

I'm no expert on stocks and market manipulations, so I hope there's an explanation for what trump was attempting to pull at his end of this "deal":

UAV is a partnership of Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, who initially pitched Trump the idea of creating Trump Media in February 2021, after the former president was banned from Twitter and Facebook following the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot...

The planned merger comes as Trump, who is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has been ordered to pay more than $500 million in civil judgments in New York, related to trial verdicts for business fraud and the defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll.

“The attempt here is to deprive them of the deal,” said Christopher Clark, the lawyer for UAV in the partnership’s Delaware lawsuit against TMTG.

“It’s not like they went out and bought a lottery ticket,” Clark said of the co-founders. “They actually went out and did the work, they created Truth Social, and now the beneficiary of that, Donald Trump, doesn’t want to pay.”

“Not a unique story, unfortunately,” Clark said, referring to Trump’s infamous practice of contesting bills from contractors and lawyers...

So trump was attempting to devalue whatever stocks Litinsky and Moss held in the Trump Media corporation, to where they'd get nothing from the buyout while he took it all.

Their lawyer Clark is pointing - if you'll recall - back to trump's infamous history of being a cheapskate and thief to anybody who did contractual work for him. Decades of trump undercutting and underpaying - if at all - his "people" to where it's a mystery why ANYBODY still wants to do business with this grifter.

It should be telling that trump allegedly hasn't even paid his best mob lawyers - his personal Roy Cohns - as Giuliani is out here telling the public trump owes him $2 million at least.

Oh, wait, NOW I get the diluting stock scheme. THAT scene from the Social Network:

Seriously, who wants to risk working for a con artist - trump, not the guy "who invented Facebook" although the jury's still out on him - who keeps ripping his underlings off?

Planning Our Escape from Twitter to... Where?

Well, after six months of insane mismanagement by Elon Musk, this past weekend of enforcing data limits on viewing is pretty much the death knell of Twitter. It's now a question how quickly this ship will sink into the Atlantic. Anne Laurie over at Balloon Juice has a number of details - especially how Musk is failing to pay his bills - which would be better to read at her article before returning back here, please and thanks. Here's a GIF of Titanic failure to pass the time until you return.

via GIPHY

Ever since Musk overpaid for Twitter - seriously, 44 BILLION?! - he has fired most of his workforce, tried to cheat employment safety guidelines, sought to make Twitter users PAY for something that had been free for them for more than a decade, allowed haters and racists back in order to spike reader interest, and eventually committed to this act of self-immolation as if to drive even addicted Tweeters - sighs and points to mirror - to flee for their lives.

I mean, I know I promised to walk away from Twitter, and I tried... for about a week, before I got pulled back by the fact most people I know were still using it, and because it was still a quick and powerful way to gain near-instant news. A lot of people pledged to get off the ship back then, and yet... We were too used (too addicted) to the app.

But we're looking at the likely abandonment of Twitter within this month as more people get frustrated with Musk's growing incompetence at managing things. It does not help Musk that more alternatives to his app are cropping up.

I had for example jumped onto CounterSocial last November. Only because a favorite for everyone else - Mastadon - was too frustrating for me to install and set up. It wasn't intuitive or helpful. Sadly not a lot of people I knew crossed onto CS, there was no audience to share, so I hadn't kept up with it.

Soon after, an alternative called Spoutible showed up, and I was able to register onto that relatively easy. It mimics a lot of features on Twitter and it should be the easiest app to shift to, except not everybody has, partly because of early controversy with Spoutible's owner being a jerk and mostly because (see below)...

Another app called BlueSky showed up a couple months ago, promising to be the best possible replacement, and it's using the Beta testing process to encourage users to invite their friends in order to make BlueSky more desirable (for those of us who never sat at the cool kids' table, this is high school all over again sigh) to join. As Twitter collapsed this weekend, BlueSky invites skyrocketed (pun intended).

And just this Monday, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook I mean Meta announced the speedup of a new app tied into the Facebook/Instagram services called Threads, which dropped this morning late Wednesday night and already got 30 million users to where Musk is threatening to sue Zuck out of spite. While shifting over to an app most people already have - Facebook has 2.99 billion users globally and Instagram which ties into Threads has 2.35 billion - would be a no-brainer, there are security and privacy concerns about the transition that makes me wary.

As you see, while Twitter is sinking, we humans are overwhelmed with choices we didn't have when Twitter started back in 2006. The instant sharing of tweets - faster than newswires and RSS feeds, easier to send to millions of readers than emails or texts - was a novel and unique software app for its day. But now that Musk is punching holes into his own luxury liner to make it sink faster, the survivors queuing for the lifeboats can't make a clean decision on which arriving cruise ship to join.

I mean, we could even go join up on Discord and tie-in to our multiplayer gaming habits, but that just breaks down to such specific cliques that general sharing could never be a reality. And hell, I am digressing here.

So, if you're keeping up at home:

Twitter: still there at https://twitter.com/PaulWartenberg playing the trumpet with the band until the ship sinks for good.

CounterSocial: Can be found at https://counter.social/@pwartenberg but I'm not sure how often I will show up, but send me a tell when you get there.

Spoutible: I'm at https://spoutible.com/PaulWartenberg and I am trying to make it a habit of cross-posting my blog flogs to increase traffic from there.

BlueSky: (I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not... /cries)

Threads: Nope, not unless they PAY me to do it.

And I'm curious, are there OTHER social apps out there playing for Twitter's market share...?

(Keeps playing Herb Alpert's "Rise" until the waters reach the deck)

"Gentlemen, it has been a priv---" (suddenly gets invite to BlueSky) "Every sucker for himself! I'm out of here!" (flees)

Update 7/21/23: Holy sh-t I DID get an invite to BlueSky. You can find me there as @paulwartenberg.bsky.social 

What Is Going On With Secrets

It's been a crazy story about U.S. military intel on Ukraine leaking via a Discord social media app managed by pro-Putin Jack Teixeira, and there's several out there talking about it, but Emptywheel has some solid takes on it like this one:

It’s something like 34 paragraphs deep into this WaPo report on how a bunch of documents got shared on a Discord server named “Thug Shaker” before WaPo reveals there was another name for the specific room in which someone who works on a military base shared classified information: bear-vs-pig, an allusion to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine...

Indeed, even the teenagers interviewed by the WaPo describe, whether they recognize it or not, that “OG” is a narcissist craving for adulation, even if comes from teenagers or people posing as teenagers in a Discord chat room...

And whether the foreigners in the Discord server had followed OG there or even had elicited these leaks, they surely saw the same thing a bunch of teenagers saw: he would and did leak to feed his own ego and rationalized doing so with claims about the Deep State, the same kind of claims that the former President spreads regularly...

Emptywheel brings up a similar point in another article:

Dan Froomkin says reporters should call Jack Teixeira’s release of highly classified documents “theft,” not a leak, distinguishing “public-spirited” leakers from “self-serving … thieves.” Spencer Ackerman muses that Teixeira, “leaked for that most ineffable thing, something nonmaterial but nevertheless hyper-real in the logic of the poster, and particularly the right-wing-chud poster: clout...”

A bunch of people who made their careers because a young, narcissistic IT guy stole a shit-ton of records about which he had little personal expertise — some incredibly important, a great many useful only to America’s adversaries — seem to be uncertain what to make of Jack Teixeira, who, early reports at least suggest, is an even younger narcissistic IT guy who stole a smaller shit-ton of records about which he had even less personal expertise, some newsworthy, some useful primarily to America’s adversaries...

The common thread, when one looks back at the history of espionage, national security leaks, and other misadventures is the level of ego that plays into the motive. Even in matters where the intent was honest - like whistleblowing about criminal intent, or at least attempting to warn people about the dangers that were coming - the person leaking that information is doing so out of ego-stroking.

Everything revealed so far about Teixeira points to a very young man desperate for validation - someone who washed out of military special forces and stuck to a low-ranking office job - who got offered the keys to a treasure chest and decided to steal from that treasure to show off to his fellow wingnut gaming buddies. At no time did Teixeira share the classified documents he had to the traditional media or even any of the Far Right media outlets he followed, at no time did he play the valiant role of whistleblower.

Jack Teixeira took advantage of a unique and troubling moment in human political affairs: A moment where the expansive system of National Security classified documentation is most vulnerable to a global interconnected social media network where a single individual could expose everything in the blink of an eye (or in the snap of a smartphone camera).

Seriously, look at our modern tech. We're carrying around miniature computers in our pockets (or on our wrists) with more calculating power than a 1980s desktop computer, with built-in cameras that would put the cigarette case spy cameras of 1960s James Bond movies to shame. All of that connected wirelessly to cell phone signals or wifi links across every cafe and public meeting place.

All of that available to any number of people motivated by modern social norms to promote themselves as Influencers on TikTok or YouTube or Twitter. "See, I got something you don't, and doesn't that make me impressive!"

We are at the point where everything we know about maintaining an edge on National Security - to keep us one step ahead of Russia or China or Iran or even Aruba - is at risk of a young low-ranking military officer with no idea of the severity that classified information is all about willing and eager to pose as above and beyond the E-3 status of their payroll.

It does not help that our Top Secret classification system is massive: Too many people creating too many documents where a lot of those documents don't need actual TSI tags but still get them because their agencies are driven by the desire to classify as much as possible to avoid any risk. Instead, they're now creating that risk because they need too many people in the military and intel agencies to handle all that damn paperwork in the first place.

There's been calls over the years that we need to cut back on the number of classified documents, that we're accidentally - or worse, intentionally - drowning ourselves needlessly in secret paperwork. We're now at the point where the intelligence community is going to break, not from a covert spy war with a foreign power but with our own nation's social media addicts.

Too many secrets. Too many idiots in charge of those secrets. We're starting to see a dangerous trend.