One thing Jack never seemed to grasp was how Twitter became a grassroots communication and organizing tool. It’s why users were so frustrated with many of his fixes. But I do think Musty gets what it is, I just think he hates who benefits hence his actions.
— Jason Karsh (@jkarsh) December 11, 2022
I’ve said this before — many people have said this before — but right now, for my purposes, there is no substitute for Twitter. There’s no other easily accessible social-media ‘global village common’ where I can find breaking news, relevant information, and shareable entertainment that works for my particular neurodivergence and tech semi-literacy. This may change in the future (not easy to imagine, given Twitter’s first-mover advantage), but at the moment, if I’m doing multiple front-page posts seven days a week, I’m going to be using Twitter.
Look: We made it through four years of TFG in the Oval Office, almost three years of a global pandemic, and our very own Great DataBase Hijacking Apocalypse. All signs point to Elon losing interest in Twitter (or having it wrested away from him) within a relatively short period of time. It’s also possible that Post (I’ve been approved to join, but haven’t yet done so) or some Mastodon confederation, or Jack Dorsey’s promised Blue Sky project will replace Twitter’s role in the ecosystem. But meanwhile…
I think Musty looks at Twitter and sees data and therefore money, but mostly he misreads people communicating for attention. And he thinks they should be talking about him, paying attention to him. This explains his ham-fisted shit-posting.
It also helps explain his hard turn to the right. If you give the conservative base what it wants (racism, conspiracy theories, etc.) they’ll give you attention. And I’m sure Musty looks at Trump and thinks, ‘First they give you their attention, then money, then loyalty.’
I think this also explains why Musty has people who will help him prop up this hellsite. Because if he turns it into a vehicle to hurt conservative boogeymen, that’s a win for them—and another avenue to control information and organizing by the masses.
Conservatives have made it abundantly clear over the last few years is that they’re done with democracy and ready for complete control. Having someone like Musty own a massive platform for organizing & information dovetails nicely w/those interests. Even if he’s a useful idiot.
I should add, i do think Musty is a smart person—in some areas. But he seems to prioritize manipulation for his own ends above all else and he clearly has massive blind spots. If this were a movie, his road to supervillianism would end poorly. But in the real world, who knows.
Some may besmirch the profit motive but Twitter would be doing much better if its current owner cared about making a profit rather than giving Ian Miles Cheong and Bari Weiss stiffies
— Senior PowerPoint Engineer (Not Parody) (@ryxcommar) December 9, 2022
They don't understand what they're looking at. They don't understand what things mean. They don't understand the history. They don't understand how all of this fits together. And they're just miseducating everyone… including Elon. It's so fucking stupid.
— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) December 11, 2022
Main takeaway from THE TWITTER FILES is that they're an extremely pathetic expression of the reactionary delusion that their views would be wildly popular if only people could see them, despite those views already being constantly disseminated by very loud & prominent idiots
— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) December 10, 2022
The fact that an enormous number of deranged people still buy their bunk is never enough for them; no one who is on their side already counts because deep down they're all embarrassed of one another and craving validation from the groups they hate. Sad!
— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) December 10, 2022
THE TWITTER FILES: You may never know love, but at least you got retweeted a bunch.
— Andrew Small (@asmall_word) December 9, 2022
would love to see a chart of Sand Hill Road wastewater stimulant metabolites plotted against a chart of cryptocurrency investments
— machine elf SRE (@revhowardarson) December 10, 2022
Give this person whatever they need, we've got important science to do https://t.co/bcvyBfkzJT
— steven ''italian elon musk'' monacelli (@stevanzetti) December 10, 2022
#GOPClownShow pic.twitter.com/T3rCqUrTY5
— Lefty Coaster (@LeftyCoaster) December 10, 2022
NotMax
Gotta admit it’s a helluva trick, making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.
//
RaflW
When Hamry says “The ‘woke elites’ are phantoms; the right just can’t handle being rejected by the normal people they’re constantly screaming at.” I harken back to what I’ve said many times: The Right hates Hollywood because, with only a few exceptions, when conservatives try to create movies, TV dramas, music or art, the great unwashed public is disinterested.
They blame the Hollywood elite, rather than their crap ability to grasp what culture resonates.
Alison Rose
Thank you, Anne Laurie. You are a big part of the reason this almost-top 10,000 blog keeps chugging along.
I keep hoping that a bunch of rich liberal celebrities will pool their money and buy Twitter back from Muskrat and then put normal people in charge.
NotMax
@RalW
Remember the smug surety that it was only a matter of a short span of time before Rick Santorum would dominate Hollywood?
Redshift
@Alison Rose: Yeah, they never seem to do things like that.
NotMax
@Alison Rose
Twitter, like Edsel before it, is now an irredeemably spoiled brand.
Poe Larity
We need to help Elon McAfee get to Mars ASAP.
Roger Moore
This is, of course, exactly what Elon wants. The goal wasn’t to search for the truth but to reach a preordained conclusion. That’s why he gave the information to partisan hacks rather than to real journalists. Real journalists might have told him, and the world, something he didn’t want to hear. Of course the drawback is the hacks are so disconnected from reality they didn’t know what they had and were willing to share information that undermined the conclusions they wanted to draw. That won’t stop the true believers, though; they, just like Musk, happily ignore the files themselves in favor of the interpretation from people who want to believe.
KCSteve
Sorry Anne, if Twitter were to go away tomorrow, for the vast majority of the population, it would be neither missed nor remembered within a few months. I’m guessing less than one per cent of Americans use twitter for anything constructive, It’s mostly clickbait and serves no useful purpose that can’t be replicated in a more reliable format. Twitter allows instant communication of a few real events at the expense of thousands of disinformation tweets. I’m hoping for a quick and ugly demise.
Brachiator
Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter and appears to hold majority control. I don’t see that anyone will wrestle it away from him. And even if he loses interest, it’s not clear that Twitter can survive his mismanagement.
Twitter has grown to serve a useful communication function. It’s unfortunate that Musk paid a big chunk of money for it and yet doesn’t recognize its value.
Poe Larity
Apparently the reichwing press is now in a fury wanting Jack Dorsey to be indicted for lying to Congress.
We should encourage this.
oklahomo
Twitter is also being hit with the death of a thousand paper cuts — use the wrong term and it triggers bot swarms pushing crypto or NFT spam (or crapto as I think of it) and it can make a useful thread trash and people stop interacting. Muting certain terms can help, but then sometimes valid news threads about crypto issues get hosed. There are also periods during which I will get followed 1 or 2 OnlyFans Lady Bots almost every day and those get blocked instantly because I don’t want their borderline NSFW profiles in my list of followers.
ETA: In the space of typing this comment and flipping back and forth to the Masnick thread, he locked his account.
NotMax
@KCSteve
True dat. Have seen credible estimates that only 20% of Twitter habitues are in the U.S. Even taking into account worldwide users who make use of it with regularity it’s small potatoes, albeit with an outsize megaphone.
Full disclosure: Never been there myself and have in the past paid it no heed. Heck, even the boxed stuff on front page posts here, at least 60% of the time, appears on this side of the screen as textual gibberish and/or a link without context (so I ignore those as well). YMMV.
Aziz, light!
Elmo is a couple of days away from spouting Q anon dogma. I have to wonder how long he can hold on to his pyrrhic prize. He might get many of his dumbass fanboys to pay him for blue checkmarks, but most people of any persuasion will not pay for Twitter access they are accustomed to getting for free. It will be like Wikipedia, which gets donations from a very small fraction of its users.
It’s said he will get bored and will hire someone else to serve as CEO, but Musk is too addicted to shitposting and the adoration of his cult (just like TFG) to ever let go. The question is how long it will take for Twitter to either break or go broke, whichever comes first.
I’ll be sorry to see it go as I depend on hundreds of providers of information about Ukraine. Usually I have already seen the tweets that Adam compiles each day.
Alison Rose
@KCSteve: This comment really shows how little you understand it. Think of how many times Twitter has been essential in emergency situations–fires, mass shootings, police riots, hurricanes, etc. Cops use it for missing children or at-risk adults. And there are countless other ways the platform has been integral, particularly as an organizing tool for grassroots groups, marginalized communities, and others. It’s the best and easiest and fastest and clearest way for politicians, law enforcement, organizations, and regular citizens to reach a broad spectrum of people quickly. Email can’t do that, Facebook can’t do that, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube…none of those can do that. And just because you’ve never had a need for it doesn’t mean a lot of other people haven’t. What is the “more reliable format” that you think could do exactly what Twitter does, as far as getting information out to thousands and thousands of people immediately? If firefighters are trying to keep residents aware of shifting winds and evacuation orders, if protestors need to let others know where the cops with pepper spray and tanks are heading next, if a school is on lockdown because of a shooter…what other platform can do what Twitter does in those situations?
NotMax
@Aziz, light!
The magnitude may vary but the nub remains.
“You’re right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in… 60 years.”
— Charles Foster Kane
;)
NotMax
@Alison Rose
Any other(s) that chooses to promote such access/capability and markets itself as a reliable outlet accordingly. For civil historical context, see the Emergency Broadcast System.
Am I alone in finding the very concept of remaining actively connected 24/7 being a necessity abhorrent?
Alison Rose
@NotMax: Okay, sure…and how long will that take to create and build and draw users and become anything close to what Twitter is now? Mastodon and Post and such are trying but it’s going to take a lot before they’re comparable. And come on—the EBS?? That worked fine when TV, radio, and print newspapers were the only forms of news media. And when there were way fewer people to communicate information to, and way fewer instances when doing so quickly and broadly was necessary. You can’t just say “someone can just make another site” and think that’s done and dusted.
Randal Sexton
I made a foray into post.news today. Its worth a look. It probably wont last but its nicely troll free.
Martin
@Brachiator: Oh, he totally recognizes its value. That’s what he seeks to destroy.
I mean, is Twitter a measure or is it a tool? We think of it as a tool, but I think it’s actually better as a measure. How do we know where a subculture stands in the overall? How do you measure that influence? One of the best measures is advertising. Ads are completely self-serving, and they go where the money is – both in scope (how many people you are reaching) and depth (how much money they have). And the product of that is where institutional power comes from – that’s the backlash against tech – lots of aggregate economic power, the product of scope and depth.
Twitter is no different than any other cultural engine except that it’s more exposed. It was never clear why NBC made its lineup the way it did, why it didn’t green light more shows starring people of color, or how they made changes to programs, etc. But those are just a form of moderation. It’s all tied up in all kinds of other institutions and access so it doesn’t *feel* like moderation, but that’s what it is. And those decisions are always tied up in getting advertisers. Advertisers are pulling in one way, the personal motives of the executives might be pulling another way (remember the tobacco 60 minutes story fiasco) and the measure of where the culture is gets impacted in the result.
But Twitter is much more transparent. The decisions are made largely in public, the rationale is right there. And that’s true of the advertisers as well. They pull ads for x days after some tragedy like Club Q because they don’t want their ad on some post discussing the gunman, etc.
So. Twitter is a much more direct measure of the culture, not just in the interplay between moderation and advertising, but also in how that advertising responds to that interplay – is ad revenue growing, suggesting that interplay is going well. And in Twitters case, ad revenue was growing faster than user engagement suggesting that the more they banned right wing voices, the more value advertisers saw in the platform.
And that’s a brutal measure for the right wing. A HUGE part of their adoration of capitalism was that advertisers reaffirmed their cultural strength. Corporations made the conservative nuclear family the center of the world for decades. But that has been shifting the last decade. They are no longer the principal marketing demographic – really of the first time in my lifetime. And you could make all kinds of excuses for this network or that network but if you really see Twitter as the ‘public square’ and given the transparency above, seeing Twitter succeed at growing ads while banning conservatives and that appearing to be a virtuous cycle is impossible to ignore. Like their inability to accept the 2020 election because of what it says about their majoritarian status, they can either accept their loss of cultural majority status, or they can invent some conspiratorial, supernatural kind of theory for why the measure doesn’t match what they believe to be true.
The simplest theory you can invent to explain that is that Twitter, not as a social network, but as a social media/broadcasting platform pushes culture in this unnatural direction. And to some degree, yeah, of course it does. How many communities did traditional TV render non-existent by refusing to show them? I mean, there’s always been LGBTQ people, but to watch TV you would think they were invented somewhere in the late 90s. So taking control of Twitter as broadcasting platform makes sense. And that’s the value of Twitter as Musk sees it – he gives right wing voices (including his) a huge microphone. In the end though it’s going to be the advertisers as the measure of whether that microphone is doing what they are trying to do. And there’s no real possibility the measure will ever arrive to their satisfaction. At best it’s a suppression of the thing that was saying they were increasingly irrelevant.
So yeah, I think Musk gets it. Twitter as a social network platform worked for some people, but it was rarely really used as that. The value was in the media aspect – the ability of NYT (or NYT Pitchbot) or Trump or Taylor Swift or whoever to broadcast to millions of people. You could reply, but there was no ‘social network’ aspect to that. Taylor Swift isn’t reading 1 million replies. Her media team aren’t even reading 1 million replies. There’s no conversation taking place. Twitter is a broadcaster, and if you’re using it as a network you’re on borrowed time because that’s not what it exists to do, and hasn’t for some time. And Musk doesn’t care about it as a network. He cares about is as a broadcaster and measure of culture, and he’s going to kill its utility as a measure because he hates the measure and will tilt the entire platform away from network and toward media, and I think the moderation changes and monetary concepts he’s putting out make that really clear.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
Nothing like going full speed reverse on the freeway during rush hour….
JoyceH
Washington Post reports that the Energy Department will be announcing a breakthrough in fusion energy production. Still a long way to commercial fusion plants, but sounds like they’re on the way.
Ruckus
@Poe Larity:
OK, I’m LOL! and enjoying it.
piratedan
@Martin: i agree with you on certain points but I want to chime in that twitter, as awkward as it was, did allow for the immediate pushback against misinformation… sure it was also great for broadcasting misdeeds of police, illustrate bad faith media stories, bring attention to people and causes doing good. The Left and the Center had managed its tools effectively to build out an independent media outside the usual sources…. THAT is what the right couldn’t let stand… they own most of the newsprint, a fair bit of broadcast, damn near all of radio… what was left: the interwebs and twitter. If they take down twitter, the left has to rebuild that messaging and information apparatus.
In its place, we will see if Post, Mastodon or Counter-Social fills the gaps, and if so, maybe they won’t be as easy to compromise as twitter was… Twitter, was a good tool, but I think intertia is in play here and we should see what arises from the ashes.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Alison Rose: Most folk don’t use Twitter. If there’s a missing child or and adult at risk, we get alerts on our cellphones.
Ruckus
@Martin:
On the whole I’ve got to give you an A+.
However I think a lot of people used this as a social media site. Certainly not everyone or maybe not even close to a majority. But a lot of people did, even if it wasn’t 100% of their time there. And it was effective at least to a point because of that, was being the operative word.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Phony Stark is also getting a lot of negative attention from the left too. So Musk has all the attentions now.
The bit about the money must be driving Dumbass Donny nuts too.
Martin
@JoyceH: Yeah, it’s not as impressive as it sounds. They got fuel to burn, which is meaningful, but not in a process that is going to lead to energy production.
They’re using lasers to get a net gain in power from the fuel, but only if you measure it in a very specific way. They’re still throwing 200x more power into the fuel than they are getting out, but they’re only really caring about the the 0.5% that actually reaches the fuel and on that 0.5%, it looks like it output 0.6% worth of power. Not nothing, but it’s easy to interpret it as more meaningful than it is.
It’s a narrow validation of certain processes, but we were almost certain to get that in a few years once ITER is complete, which should produce a more impressive advance in an installation which will demonstrate a lot more of the needed technologies to get us to power generation.
But fusion as a power source is very far off for commercial use simply because even if ITER outperforms its design, building a power plant that can pay for itself is ages off. These are incredibly complex machines. It might find a non-economic use a lot sooner – much as nuclear reactors were MUCH more valuable in submarines than as power plants.
Ruckus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Has em ever expressed a lefty posture? He’s a very pale white, rich boy from South Africa. He didn’t get all his money from the companies he has in the US. He earned a bit more than just a bit from family stuff, I believe diamond mines. I don’t recall him being particularly lefty friendly, ever. Sure, he’s showing what he’s made of since he bought twitter but I’d bet he’s been that way a long time.
Brachiator
@Martin:
This kind of thing was only unclear to naive and willfully blind white people.
No. They are a form of racism or bigotry.
None. Communities of color existed and thrived or suffered independent of media acknowledgement. Same is true of gay, lesbian and transgender communities.
Oddly enough, there is a vibrant Black Twitter community, which Musk ignores or devalues or actively hates, even as he panders to white racists, sexists and homophobes.
He is intent on making social media as narrow as, say, 1950s television. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
Joey Maloney
Let’s stop pretending that Twitter (or something like it) is not a public utility. Have the US government nationalize it and hand it to a quasi-independent corporation to operate. Like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or the Post Office.
The resulting wingnut meltdown would be merely lagniappe.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It’s not that hard to say “there is no alternative to Twitter at this moment”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Ruckus:
Huh? let me repeat
Musk is like a bad ex, he will just keep on doing crap just to get people pissed at him rather than be ignored like the useless twatwaffle he is.
Martin
@Ruckus: Oh, I agree. LOTS of people used it as a social media platform. And whole cultures developed in there.
However, that’s value to us. That’s not value to Twitter, or its shareholders or advertisers. Nobody is paying for that. And if nobody is paying for it, then nobody should have any expectation that it won’t be wiped out. If you aren’t paying for the thing you value, beware – you’re not standing on solid ground.
NotMax
@Alison Rose
All the more evidence why relegating any such urgent functionality to any marginally vetted, advertising supported entity is a ludicrous concept.
Or what Joey Maloney and BillinGlendale CA said.
Ascap_scab
I have throttled way back on Twitter. I have been approved for Post.News and set up under my own name (just like Twitter) now that I’m retired and no longer give an eff. Am starting to explore the space, but it’s a slow grind starting from zero.
As for the future of Twitter, if not for the massive sink hole of money, I do believe Erratic Elon would quickly lose interest, but he is going to scavenge the profits from his only profitable venture, Tesla, and suck it dry to placate his ego and watch his entire empire become a giant Boring company. Then Bonesaw Bin Salman will invite him to an embassy somewhere.
elliottg
Twitter is dead. At some point, people move on and I think the tipping point has been reached (“prosecute/Fauci”). Something will replace Twitter; it might take some time. It’s possible that nothing will replace Twitter for me (or Anne Laurie). It might be that I just suffer the loss. You can’t have Musk posting anti-vax sh*t, violating assumed privacy of users communications, and letting the signal to noise ratio drop so low that the only way to maintain usefulness is active measures.
Twitter is dead.
NotMax
@Martin
A little background on network TV and ads from the stone age.
Worked at a big ad agency in NYC for a few years during the end of the1970s and early 1980s, mostly on TV ad placement for Procter & Gamble and General Foods accounts. One task I was assigned on occasion (and was not the only one in whose lap such fell) was, whenever something was scheduled to be aired (be it regular programming or movie) which someone above my pay grade or at the advertiser suspected might be controversial, to trek over to CBS or NBC or ABC headquarters and commandeer a room to screen said programming in toto in advance. After which, based on my judgment (or that of whomever else had been sent to view), one of three outcomes would occur.
1) Nothing of major note, so leave scheduled ads in place.
2) Shuffle ad placement around so as to appear temporally distant from a particular scene or incident deemed sketchy.
3) Pull completely out of airing ads during that particular episode or broadcast and transfer the spot(s) to programming roughly matching the audience demographic and ratings.
.
In my limited experience, everyone, be it network, agency or advertiser was extremely, extremely loathe to unlock option #3 and would bend over backwards not to do so.
Joey Maloney
I still find Twitter useful. I make liberal use of the block feature (including TFG, Musk himself, and any asshole that even mildly annoys me) and I have the feed set to Latest Tweets which minimizes the algorithm’s influence. In that way I don’t see much of the RWNJ bullshit unless I go looking for it.
Some of the people I follow for politics/current events have already decamped and if that trend continues eventually it’ll just be kitten pics and my own shitposting, and that probably won’t be enough to keep me engaged.
The Thin Black Duke
Whenever marginalized communities build a “safe place” for themselves, the usual bigoted suspects from the right-wing fever swamps will seek it out and destroy it; it’s what they do. If Elon can’t have Twitter, he’ll decimate it so nobody else can have it. Sooner or later, there will be an alternative to Twitter, and it will be another “safe place” for everybody else who isn’t a white heterosexual male–until the hateful motherfuckers destroy that too. Again.
satby
@Joey Maloney: what you said. And what @Alison Rose: said too. Twitter is used world wide; as is typical of US (A), we focus on our experience of it and forget how people, especially marginalized, oppressed, or living under wartime conditions use it to get information out to the rest of the world. Eventually another platform will replace it, that’s normal tech evolution. Right now nothing does yet. Edited: and what The Duke says so very well too.
raven
@NotMax: The phrase that inspired my dissertation!
geg6
@NotMax:
Raises hand. 🖐️
I get texts from my employer and local emergency services when there is a local emergency. If Twitter was the the best or only place to get that sort of information, I’ll be shit out of luck because I don’t Twitter.
I get that there are people in other countries and in certain communities that have used Twitter to good effect. But something will take its place for all those people. Twitter is not necessary. This idea that it is seems ridiculous to me. The world changes and finds better avenues and we all move on. The black, LGBTQ and disabled communities and Ukrainians and Iranians will find another way to communicate. Twitter is not the only way to communicate.
Montanareddog
@The Thin Black Duke:
Well said. It really chaps the hide of authoritarians when the serfs think for themselves.
In other words, it is a never-ending war; we must accept that, revel in our wins and move on from losses.
lowtechcyclist
@The Thin Black Duke:
I’m sure George Soros has no interest in creating whatever the next thing is that replaces Twitter. Which is a shame only because that would drive the wingnuts so far up the wall that there’s no oxygen up there.
Frankensteinbeck
Musk is an internet troll. Since they’re inherently cruel, trolls move farther and farther right over time. Those are his motivators. Everything else is a detail.
Details:
I am sorry to see Twitter go, because of its use for sharing info by regular people, and its utility to marginalized communities. Musk’s moderation issues will hit worldwide, even though nobody whose first language isn’t English gives a shit about his personal antics, and frankly barely any Americans care.
I figured he would physically crash it with his staff cuts and total technical ignorance before he drove everyone off or the money and international regulators problems came knocking. Who knows, might still happen, because that’s an ‘it works until it doesn’t’ thing. But all of these are inevitable. We just expect ‘instant’.
And no, he can’t shrug off Twitter’s death. Musk’s wealth is in inflated stocks. He needed help from other rich dumbfucks to buy Twitter. He may survive crashing Twitter, but he can’t walk away unharmed.
Geo Wilcox
Musk isn’t the only one behind destroying Twitter. Remember to include his fellow investors like the Saudi’s . It’s part of their plan to ruin the ability of the peons to organize against the bazillionaires.
Frankensteinbeck
@Geo Wilcox:
I doubt it. If this has demonstrated anything, it’s that right wing rich people are as stupid as the rubes they supposedly manipulate. The ones with political motivations are going to be far less calculated and grandiose than you describe. It’s a raw ‘make liberals unhappy’ or ‘stop criticizing me’ rather than a calculated supervillain plan to crush the weak. But frankly, just as likely they’re high on their own supply and think Musk is a genius.
Geminid
@Geo Wilcox: As far as I can tell Saudi interests own about 4% of Twitter. That is a $2 billion stake that a Saudi prince had using the nation’s investment fund money. He rolled this investment in the old company into the new one.
The Qatari sovereign wealth fund has a smaller stake. It could be other Gulf Arab interests have invested money through private investment outfits like Sequoia Capital.
A good summary of the various stakes in Twitter can be found in the CNBC artice “The Elon Musk-Twitter purchase: Who is financing the deal?” October 28, 2022. Basically, Musk put up $25 billion (or maybe $27 billion, don’t have my notes at hand), of which $17 billion came from sale of Tesla stock in April and October.
Seven big banks lent Musk $13 billion, including Morgan Stanley with $2.5 billion. The remainder was put up by private investors like the Saudi and Sequoia Capital.
oldster
Elno Skum got on stage last night at the end of a Dave Chappelle show in SF. A crowd of 18k people in the arena booed him into silence. Reports state that he turned into a corncob. Chappelle tried to help him out, but it was hopeless and so was Skum.1
Soprano2
Henry the Bartender is correct – right wingers really believe they are “one weird trick” away from getting everyone to agree with them.
Geminid
@Geminid: On the more general question of whether or not front pagers here should use material from Twitter, my attitude is that when I have a job I’m competent and experienced at I don’t let other people tell me how to do it. Similarly, I’m not going to tell someone who is good at their job how to do theirs.
Wvng
To those above arguing that Twitter is no big deal and not worth saving, I would note they are saying this on an Anne Laurie post, the same AL who has kept the BJ community reliably informed on Covid for more than two years through use of Twitter to find essential information from around the world. Fercrissakes, she even said as much in this post. Anne said Twitter is currently irreplaceable for her purposes.
Betty
@Martin: That all makes sense, but maybe overstated a bit. Adam Schiff was brought here to discuss his book because his staff responded to a fairly innocuous tweet from me about the 1/6 Committee. I am a complete nobody but had followers who were sonebodies. It has been a unique space which I regret losing.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Alison Rose: Thanks, Alison. As I’ve said before, twitter is where I can let a wide range of people know I have a new book.
I don’t need it to keep in touch with jackals. I can do that here. But former grad students or colleagues or neighbors? Agents, editors, people I meet at cons or on vacation? Newspeople, experts in various fields, etc. How long will it take me to recreate those connections, assuming I ever can? I’ve been on twitter since 2009. That’s how long.
Betty Cracker
FWIW, I think Twitter’s utilities will be difficult to replicate, and people’s use of it varies so widely that there isn’t a single correct answer on how we should respond to its takeover by a reactionary oligarch who is turning it into a disinformation engine. I made my choice but don’t judge anyone who chooses differently.
Mai Naem mobile
@Frankensteinbeck: it doesn’t have to be one or the other…it could be all of the above. The Saudis get help with dealing a tool used by democracy activists. Elmon at the same time gets his jollies owning the libs. The Qataris are probably using it for something related to the World Cup.
Falling Diphthong
And money. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the twitter files and prosecute Fauci stuff just happens to be occurring right as they relaunch “Give us $8 and we’ll verify you as anyone.”
It’s marketing. Musk will bottle their outrage and sell it back to them.
MisterDancer
I posted here that I left Twitter, and why. Yet I took some pains to not make it a “you must leave!” post, and that was part of why. I encourage a mass exodus, yet am not blind that people NEED TWITTER RIGHT NOW.
Interestingly, I read a Daily Kos post earlier today that indicated Twitter loses money on embeds:
I have no external proof of that assertion (but will check around if I get time). That said, that post is a good extension of AL’s, going into detail on not only the toxicity Musk is pushing onto Twitter, but also additional ways to use Twitter as safely as possible.
Just…just be safe, gang.
J R in WV
Anne Laurie, you do a fabulous thing here at Balloon Juice, and I an grateful to no end. Thanks so much for the work you do aggregating news of all sorts from all over!
I have no doubt I will criticize elmo Muskrat as much as the next liberal progressive, but you should have no illusion that I’m being critical of what you do for us, ever, at all, also too.
Thanks again !!!
eversor
All social media networks die. This is why Zuck kept buying out the next one and changed the name to Meta.
The way it plays out is simple. At first it’s just techie people. Then come the youngs and the artists. This is your growth phase. Then come companies and it takes off. The next thing that happens is the kiss of death, the olds. Once that happens it’s over you’re going to die. The last phase of this death is being mobbed by right wingers and cranks. AOL chats, Yahoo Groups, MySpace, and on and on and on this pattern keeps playing out. If you see someone 50 or over on it put a fork in it the damn thing is dead and toxic. As someone in my 40’s I’m old enough to be toxic on one of these things. It’s stars and the young who drive them. If you are over 40 and not a major music or movie brand and on one of these things, whelp you’re on a platform that’s going to die.
Musk put this process in overdrive but long ago Twitter and facebook lost counting for anything than old people and right wingers to instagram. Oddly once olds and conservatives moved to instagram the writing was on the wall and tiktoc crushed it.
Don’t mourn it’s loss. Also marginalized groups have been organizing since forever. Just that it’s more public now doesn’t make it superior. For internet purposes this has been around since usenet and newsgroups and still exists on archaic non shit platforms like IRC chat (is still a thing! I get Quake matches on there, amazing!).
Twitter and facebook are the most known surfaces of where people talk but they aren’t the be all end all of it. They are widely viewed as jokes as well. They only “work” because people care. If people stop caring they will pull a MySpace and the next thing will come around. Nothing will be lost.
Twitter had a serious old and mainstream problem way before Musk drove it into the ground and this was well known. Twitter drives a small amount of conversation between a few key figures who think it’s real life and don’t realize they are completely ignored by the majority of users who are just following video games and cat vids. My twitter has always been computer stuff, cat vids, video game stuff, and high end audio and I only see true “twitter” when someone releases a product that shows up in my email feed and I click it. The only people that care about twitter are those that are always on it.
Don’t worry about the marginalized groups. They aren’t organizing on Twitter for the most part. Twitter is a transmit source out of those communities but they aren’t really on it because it was never safe. This is why when you see all the bullshit rightwing stuff or marginalized stuff now it all originates on places like Discord. Groups are locked there, like they all with all the real chatter. It has voice. And days before something is a thing on twitter it’s a thing there. The only people who give a flying fuck about Twitter or think it matters are a bunch of old fuckers caught in their own bubble.
Dorothy A. Winsor
It seems twitter is about to change the character limit from 280 to 4000.
Who the hell will read 4000 characters on twitter?
schrodingers_cat
Use Twitter if you want or don’t. This endless navel gazing about Twitter is boring.
New topic, please.
MisterDancer
That’s NOT BY CHOICE and you should know that, if you know these groups at all.
Discord is fine for organizing. It’s shit for the kind of serendipitous “coming together” of marginalized voices that Twitter excels in. Your analysis utterly ignores that the 1st “power” that social media like Twitter provides isn’t organizing — it’s a platform for calls to action!
Without the ability to call people to movements, you have no one to organize. That’s crucial to what marginalized people were and still are, in the face of a growing headwind of hate, trying to do on Twiiter,every day.
Twiiter allowed for easy discovery for people joining those groups, with (back in the day) low risk. By “back in the day” I’m talking pre-GamerGate, when the forces we now call the alt-right had not really built the networks of doxxing and harassment they have, today. Just look at any study on how Twitter helped fuel the Arab Spring as one key example.
Same with #BlackLivesMatter or #MeToo, for that matter. We know this because Twiiter is the major social media service that leverages the hashtag motif those movements use. We know #MeToo as a slogan came from a MySpace post from Tarana Burke — and was reused on Twitter by Alyssa Milano, first as a phrase, then as the hashtag, a day later. And from there, aligned to the accusations against Weinstein, people built up that into a movement.
These are known and documented ways Twitter has been critical to marginalized people, to not just have a voice, but to find others who have a voice. These are systems of organization that are actually hard to replicate.
Finally: as the son of Jim Crow activists, I fucking know real well that people have been organizing since forever. My Dad has a rad story about having dinner with Dr. King!
I also know something of THE COST. Twitter provides, still, a balance for many between safety and outreach that’s not beaten, yet. We raise voices not because that’s gone, but because Musk is a risk to that, and that risk is growing daily.
And that risk is what’s causing Twiiter to risk failure. Your “age is the cause of social media failure” ignores a host of failures, from Friendster to Tribe.net to Oukut, where the median age was low but a host of other factors caused them to collapse.
And Twitter is NOT FAILING BECAUSE OF THE MEDIAN AGE. Hell, Twitter just pulled it’s 1st profit in years, just a year or so ago! Twiiter was no worse off than a lot of social media companies, and in some ways had some real opportunities to excel, under the right leadership.
That it’s not going to is about Musk, not about your Ageist hot take.
Ken
@Martin: Damn. Well, back to my plans for stealing the plutonium. 1.21 gigawatts doesn’t come out of nowhere, you know.
Shalimar
@Ruckus: Becoming the primary spokesperson for electric vehicles and space travel was his appeal to rich lefties. You could probably add his tunnel scam to that list. He was perceived as a lefty because he made a profit from being perceived that way. I don’t think it was ever genuine.
As for his money, family money may have paid for his education and his first start-up tech business, but 99%+ of his wealth was self-generated. Mostly from being paid handsomely to leave companies he helped create and grow. Tesla was the first company that he took over at the mature phase rather than being paid to go away when experienced management took over as at Paypal.
Burnspbesq
@eversor:
FOAD.
Shalimar
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I read 4000 character threads on Twitter all the time. They’re not as good as a blog post, but a thread of 15 posts is sometimes necessary for more detailed thoughts. I see absolutely no point in increasing the character limit per post though. It just encourages people to be sloppy with their thinking rather than concise.
Raoul Paste
“entertainment that works for my particular, neurodivergence and tech semi-literacy…”
“ like a kidney stone, Musk too, shall pass…”
It’s so enjoyable to read this richly-deserved Musk-bashing,. Well done
Bill Arnold
@NotMax:
The brand was Ford. So what is your point?
Bill Arnold
@KCSteve:
Frankly, this assertion marks you as ignorant.
Bill Arnold
@Poe Larity:
Would be excellent theater for at least one such witness to give RW house “investigators” the open contempt, on camera, that they so fully deserve.
The Moar You Know
Maybe one more hit
Then I’ll quit
You can hear the sobs of the junkies best in the dead of the dark
Real dark or their own personal slice of it
Judgment day cannot be put off
kindness
I am not the target audience here. I never joined Twitter. I don’t have the time to glean through all the bullshit to find the occasional pearl. As much as I use computers & the internet, I’ve always preferred a real world notion to a virtual one that holds promise. Musk isn’t going to let go of Twitter. It’s his drug now and you are all vassals to his state. It’s going to become another 4chan because Musk holds too much of it for the other owners to be able to wrest it from him. Letting go is hard. But just like bad relationships, you all have to move on. Expecting magic pixie dust to make it all better isn’t a great plan.
jnfr
My communities continue to mostly hold together on Twitter and I suspect will do so until the end. A lot of folks hang via Discord too, especially since people into gaming are already used to using it as a chat room and it works well for that. Mastodon is actually lively now. I first joined there in 2017 and literally couldn’t put together enough people I knew to ever get a conversation going, but now there are friends around every day.
Musk is a pure right-wing asshole but that’s not new and I can’t say it’s affecting me directly for the most part.
UncleEbeneezer
@Joey Maloney: I don’t think that will ever happen. But in my fantasy the govt takes over Twitter and sets strict moderation guidelines enforced by a team of Women, Black People, Transgender People etc. To qualify as a Moderator you first have to pass crash courses on Feminism, accurate US History (what wing nuts decry as “Critical Race Theory” etc.
UncleEbeneezer
@Wvng: This!! Nothing has been more helpful for Covid information than Twitter (and AL’s posts here). One of my fave podcasts does a great rundown of stories, but even they can’t go as deep as your typical AL post.
Twitter has also been extremely helpful for my personal evolution on Race, Feminism, Transgender Issues, US History, Systemic Oppression and how DOJ works (especially with regards to 1/6 investigations/indictments). I’ve also learned plenty from FB, podcasts and blogs, but at least in the past few years I’d say that long Twitter threads have been probably 50-60% of where most of my learning on the stuff I care about happens. It’s also been crucial for keeping an eye out for political actions that I then signal-boost to my own Indivisible group & friends on FB. Any calls to action I put out to my roughly 500 member group for State or Federal action (call your Rep, Senator, Governor etc.) almost always involves using a Twitter link (local stuff is usually from local news link or FB).
cain
@JoyceH: The oil industry will fight it (long enough to adopt it of course) – the GOP will always represent old money – the robber barons of old against the new entrepreneur, which is funny because capitalism is always about competing – these folks just like to cheat.
cain
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: I have not seen this as much (eg missing people trending on twitter)
But a great example of Twitter’s power is a personal one that I have. Some of you know I am part of a non-profit/open source project called GNOME. At one point, Groupon – decided to create a Point of Sale product running Linux and called it G-NOME – I was the director of the GNOME Foundation at the time and we ended up having a fight for our trademark over a well monied corporate interest. A fight we’d likely lose since these folks were just throwing more and more trademarks that we had to fight in order to overwhelm us (we don’t have money)
So we started to do a fundraising campaign – that we communicated to Groupon.
I released the tweet from the @gnome account and walked away at 5pm. By the next day, that tweet was shared reshared and Groupon got HAMMERED with angry people closing their accounts – there was even a DOS attack. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Groupon begged us to make it stop. It took a few weeks. The best part was that I had released the tweet the day before they were to meet with investors and created an unforseen media shitshow for maximum effect.
We ended up fundraising over $250k to fight the patents and then also added received compensation and of course all trademark applications were withdrawn. Good times.
cain
@Brachiator:
Black twitter is one of the most entertaining hashtags to follow. I just have such a good time and I keep having to put my fingers away from the keyboard to respond because it’s not my space. Instead I just keep hitting that heart button while giggling uproariously.
Shalimar
@kindness: Twitter is not like a bad relationship. It’s like a big city with lots of bad parts of town. You can still create a great community on your street and in your neighborhood. There are ways of blocking out the scum, and ways of avoiding all the bad areas.
Musk is making it worse. Plenty of good people are moving to better towns. Eventually everyone will move if Musk doesn’t sell. But all of it isn’t a hellhole right now, and none of us should be judging others for their very personal decisions to stay or go.
cain
@The Thin Black Duke: I was reading on the elephant site that links to mastodon are automatically set as “sensitive”. That fool is not happy and I for one am glad.
Ramona Rosario
@oldster: Lovely!
cain
I think more worrisome is that Elon Musk and his satellites to bring internet across the globe. You need network to do the networking and if you’re using his system he can easily fuck with you there.
Jinchi
True. Elon was trying for a subscription model, but aimed at content creators instead of readers. There is no value in having a blue check for the majority of people who simply scroll through threads.
Subsole
@oklahomo:
You…
You mean…
the great Libertarian dream of telling companies to cut every corner they don’t like doesn’t produce a better quality product?
Next you’ll tell me the techno-barons aren’t passing the savings on to the serfs…
Ruckus
@geg6:
For some number, twit was a/the major way to communicate with people that they might/likely never be face to face with. To possibly open, or close a/the line of communication. Now occasionally that line of communication was worse than no communication because we saw negative communication. But even that can be useful.
On seeing that some people really, really do not like other human beings for really crappy reasons, or none at all, might just be an awakening for a lot of people. Or not. But the concept that we humans have a variety of responses to the same issue/concept of humanity is/should be at least eye opening.
All that said, I agree that twit is not necessary. And if it has good points, something will take it’s place. Because enough humans will make it work. Right up until the moment it no longer does. And then the process will start over. Again.
GibberJack
@Aziz, light!: Twitter won’t go broke if Musk doesn’t want it to. I read the yearly interest is something like $1.3 billion. Musk still has $170 billion. He can cover the interest and the losses for a hundred years, if he wants to.
It’s a vanity project for a vain and narcissistic rightwing reactionary billionaire. The value in it is for his own reasons. And I don’t think he will get bored with it, any more than Trump got bored with it.
GibberJack
@Jinchi: Charging content creators to publish their work is so bizarre. It’s the exact opposite of how most publishing works. Except for a vanity press model.
Ruckus
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think it’s more that humans run the scale of what we are and what we can do. Some are evil and controlling, I give you vlad. There are many others. We vary in levels of intelligence, in physical skills, in logical thought, learned facts, learned falsehoods. And all the possible combinations. Now I will agree with you that some/many people think everything should be along strict lines, even as some/many of those same people often do not observe those strict lines, or even come close.
Aziz, light!
@GibberJack: That’s the interest on the loans, not the company’s operating expenses, which were $5.7 billion in 2021. Most of that came from advertising revenues, which are swirling down the drain along with whatever is left of his mind.