I know, you’re “tired” of hearing about Musk, and Twitter, and so on. But I assure you, Musk and his growing cadre of Fellow Travelers ain’t tired of spreading hate.
And that’s what Twitter is now — a massive system for changing culture to become ever more hateful:
Musk has found a new scapegoat: the Jews. Or rather, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish community’s largest and oldest organization dedicated to fighting not only anti-Semitism but all forms of racial and religious bigotry and other forms of discrimination. But I suspect the “rather” or the distinction in general might be lost on Musk’s 155 million Twitter followers. Over the past several days Musk has gone on a tear claiming that the catastrophic decline in his company’s value since he purchased it is mostly or entirely the fault of the ADL and churning up Twitter debates that at least big time anti-Semitic accounts think is clearly boosting their cause.
(For more background on this hellshow, see here. And this is only “new” from a Musk personally pushing it POV, otherwise see this 2022 report on same.)
There’s no catchy comment here, no smooth quip. Just the staggering realization that — just like his spreading of Trans hate, or his allowance for racist slurs…it’s just not safe on Twitter, anymore, for a growing cadre of marginalized people. I’ve lost the reference to the comment where I got this (feel free to remind if it was you!), but this post brings receipts, a sample of the hate currently flowing freely down the channels Twitter enables. Click at your own peril.
He bought a platform that was already full of problems — and promise — and just made it so much worse, while also desperately keeping the pieces that people like my fellow front pagers lean on to inform us. It’s a problem, and a growing one. And we need to keep that in mind, y’all, before these attacks become more sophisticated, the nuance we depend on as Progressives lost in a sea of deliberate, planned, disinformation.
I fear the moment Musk brings in someone who can twist more than just Musk’s ego. Someone who can drive the way the application works to their goal to dismantle Social Justice values. There are ways, I suspect, to cause massive damage outside of the semi-random toxic voice boosting happening now.
Because, yeah, hating Jews is a whole big red neon fuckin’ sign, people. Not that we didn’t have sign after sign, before, but with every new ejaculation of hate, we need to have grave concerns about Musk, and the power he now wields in our society. Twitter is powerful, and not just in terms of profits and ad reach.
I have opined in the past that Twitter became a central platform in social media, esp. across the world, for the same reason so many sniggered and laughed at it — the character limit and early lack of image/video support. These “gaps” allowed Tweets to flow over SMS. Recall 2007? When Twitter started, there was no iPhone, no easy way, on mobile, to browse the web. Being able to not just send, but receive, short messages via Twitter was like magic. I remember posting via SMS to Twitter on my wee cell phone while sitting in the middle of nowhere, reaching social media years before I held a phone that supported a proper browser, much less apps.
Even by the time you get to the Arab Spring in the early 2010’s, take up of iPhones/Android wasn’t even complete in the US, much less other countries. Add to that nascent attempts to lock down the Internet in those countries during those events, the increased use of same to coordinate protests and get the word out to the world, hogging lines…I can’t imagine that chaos. Using SMS to get to social media was critical, in ways we’ve already forgotten.
And now, this system used to organize Progressive voices? Is filing up with more and more alt-Right ideas and hateful content. The people who built systems for Positive Change on Twitter, being drowned out. In a very indirect way, Twitter is revering to the mean — being mean.
The feminist scholar Audre Lorde had a prescient comment, oft-used in activist circles, that touches on this point:
the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
Dorsey never really wanted Twitter to be what it became. He never, I think, really grasped Gibson’s observation that “The street finds its own uses for things.” And I think Gibson and Lorde are on the same track here, even if Lorde is really a caution, I think, about Gibson (and really, all of Cyberpunk), about using swords as plowshares, about the limits of using tools built to cause harm — or just churn profit — to heal.
Twitter is being rebuilt to cause harm. And it behooves us to think on that, and consider the growing risks around that. We have shared goals of making the world better; can those goals happen with “the master’s tools”?
Again: no catchy answer needed, right now. It’s OK to say “I don’t know either!” It’s just worth it to think on this, and keep it in mind as we use that platform, and so many others.
You don’t have to fix it today. You can even say “I ain’t the fool to fix it!” Yet we cannot hide what Twitter is becoming…and I think we laugh at it, and Muck, at our longer-term peril.
(NOTE: I’ve got no patience for fancy tags on this post/hating Jews/Islamophobic BS in the comments — especially on the anniversary of 9/11. Open Thread, otherwise.)
Baud
I’m saddened that it’s taking Threads and Bluesky so long to get their ducks in a row and kill off Twitter once and for all.
(None of the other alternatives seem to have really caught on).
trollhattan
If you’re defined by your enemies, then having the ADL and SPLC single you out pretty much cements you’re an asshole.
MisterDancer
@Baud: With all due respect, because I wish the same fervently?
There is no one true Twitter killer. Like I say in the post, there was a specific situation (really multiple, but this was long enough!) that helped boost Twitter to the position it held. The Internet is not at all in the same position these days, just as Facebook “killed” MySpace more because of MySpace’s lack of evolution to take advantage of the then-modern web than anything else.
There’s just no big tech change that can boost an app to kill Twitter. If Twitter dies, it will be mostly it’s own doing — again, like MySpace.
Dangerman
I can’t begin to imagine what lighting 40+ B on fire feels like. I mean, I don’t care how rich you are, that’s telling your shareholders that you are an idiotic prick. That and a dozen or so kids with I forget how many women. I wouldn’t put a dime in any company he ran.
Geminid
I will hang out on Twitter a while longer, mainly for the Ukraine reporting by people such as Tendar, Noel Reports, and Visegrad 24.
I’ve also become fascinated with Turkish Twitter, and seem to have fallen with a bunch of “old school Kemalists.” Or Galatasary Football Club fans, I’m not sure which.
MisterDancer
@Dangerman: Re: Twitter shareholders — Twitter is now privately held:
Baud
@MisterDancer:
International Twitter users don’t care about the things about Musk that disturb us. They will stay in Twitter as long as it’s working and there’s no alternative.
Meta has a big international presence so I had some hope they would be more aggressive with Threads. But from what I hear, they haven’t been.
schrodingers_cat
I came late to Twitter. I had an account and lurked but only started tweeting since 2019 when Modi got reelected. Most of my friends and family in India have drunk the BJP KoolAid , so it has been a great pleasure to connect with people who are fighting the good fight. Tweeting in Marathi and Hindi has also been a plus. I have connected with grassroots political workers, academics and ordinary citizens who haven’t bought the Sanghified version of the past and the present.
The Indian MSM is compromised. Guys watch this documentary to get an idea of what’s been happening in the media space in India. Why it is called the Godi (rhymes with Modi with a soft d sound) media.
I am not leaving Twitter, yet.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I am staying even though I am not happy with what Musk is doing. There is simply no alternative if I want to know what’s happening in India that goes beyond the piddling coverage India gets in the US media.
Also it is place that aggregates media in Hindi and Marathi which gives me on the ground info about what is happening in the Hindi heartland, Delhi and Mumbai.
The alternative that is emerging to Twitter is YouTube in the Indian political space.
The link to the documentary mentioned in the earlier comment.
Dangerman
@MisterDancer: I was thinking Tesla, et al
Snarki, child of Loki
Twitster and BookFace are clearly the targets for which thermonuclear weapons were designed, although it was not known at the time.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Interesting. Is TikTok banned in India?
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Yes it was banned because Dalits and tribal people started building a following, which the Brahminical Junta Party detests. Security concerns regarding China was the official reason.
BTW Vivek Ramaswamy is a type I totally recognize. He reminds of the upper caste suck ups of the white man during British rule. These Brown sahibs were more British and vicious than the gora sahibs.
RandomMonster
Would the verb be ejacul-hate?
MisterDancer
@Dangerman: Ah, fair enough. Telsa stock did take a hit, but seems to have stabilized, as I recall.
MisterDancer
Ohhhhhh, good one!
mrmoshpotato
@Geminid: Over on YouTube, UATV English is a very good source of reliable information.
Jay
I have abandoned twitter. Those twitter accounts that I used to read on twitter, I use Nitter for.
I used to repost stuff from my own account, once in a blue moon posted my own thoughts, had 12 followers, 6 of which were hate followers. Learned early on to avoid the comments on threads, as even at it’s best, twitter comments on posts were garbage.
MisterDancer
That’s certainly fair, and goes back to my point about non-US voices using Twitter historically. Certainly for me I’ve lost some of the voices out of North Africa and into the Arabian peninsula that I used to follow, and given a current project that’s a hit I’m having to find other ways to close, but I’m at a remove that can “afford” to take that step.
piratedan
I’ve relocated to both Mastodon and BlueSky (if you need a BlueSky invite, hit me up somehow). I like Mastodon because I cultivate my feed to keep what I want in it and I’m not algo’ed to death on it. I boost who I wish. Newer to BlueSky, because Dorsey was originally involved but supposedly is not tied to the decision making process on it now.
While either has their appeal, what bothers me the most is the fact that certain people, who I would believe would not prefer to be associated with what is taking place on Twitter now, have not left it. Professional Sports teams regardless of the sports, certain entertainment entities and even entities like NYT Pitchbot and We Rate Dogs are STILL there.
THAT is what I don’t understand… while I get that building yourself a social media following is a helluva thing and has to be a double-edged source of internet fame, staying there on that platform seems to place yourself above what is going on by continuing to drive traffic there.
dc
@Geminid:
@Geminid:
Noel Reports in on Mastodon.
Bill Arnold
My primary objection to twitter at the moment is that it has gone full-propaganda-platform. For that, it needs to be destroyed or mostly-neutered, before the 2024 US elections at least.
– The API is now a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive than low-budget researchers studying propaganda networks can afford, including the low-budget people who find influence operations real-time.
– The algorithms for both the feeds (I don’t use them) and for sorting replies are thoroughly subverted at this point. Mr. Musk could, for instance, 2 months before the 2024 elections, turn on automation to deboost accounts friendly to Democrats, and change the deboosting level and details frequently, and deny it. He will do this, or similar, if the believes he can get away with it. “Paid” accounts are automatically seriously boosted, and are mostly RW trash (many of them Musk fluffers) at least in the English language, and they entirely dominate long reply sections.
– Verification of account owners is problematic at best; increasing amounts of fraud, including by propagandists, state and otherwise
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t want to pull you in further, but have you checked Turkish cat Twitter? One account that you might appreciate is Anatolian Cat (@anatoliancat). They take a scientific approach, tracing cat evolution, studies of medieval cat diets, etc.
Others just highlight the respected position cats have in Turkish society. A typical video might be a cat laying down near the top of an escalator, with people quickly stepping around it rather than shooing it away. Or people buying cat food at an Istanbul vending machine to feed some of the city’s many stray cats, or a statue of a famous street cat.
I saw one where a security camera caught a guy kicking a stray cat. Another guy ran over and started punching him until a 3rd man pulled him off.
I’ve read that the cultural respect for cats came from the need to keep the rat population down so as to avoid plagues. But whatever the origin, it’s very strong.
Baud
@Geminid:
Good.
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid: Followed. Cat Twitter is a joy. I have mutuals from Australia, Canada and UK.
Geminid
@dc: Yeah, I think I’ll be able to find all those people on alternate platforms. I’m just a very slow adopter.
I did start seeing overtly anti-Semitic material last fall for the first time. I don’t run into it on the accounts I follow, but I think it wouldn’t be hard to find if I checked out certain topics.
NotMax
With any luck, the realization has dawned on advertisers just how inefficient on a cost/benefit basis Twitter was as a platform to drive sales. The herd mentality for advertisers to leap aboard a shiny object may — may — be in abeyance.
Scout211
I just read the Book Review of Isaacson’s book Elon Musk. Originally published in the LA Times, the reader learns more about Elon’s racist, antisemitic, anti-worker and anti-LGBTQ+ background by reading the review than by reading the book, which leaves much of that background out.
cain
I’m mostly on mastodon although overall I’m not on social media as much as I used to be. Most of my open source, free software people are on mastodon. The people I engage in at work are on Mastodon (eg high performance computing, etc).
I am on twitter occasionally, but I’ve found that my timeline is filled with more ads, and more people shoved into my timeline that I’m not interested in – some of it are right wing assholes. I mostly just read the latest Tom Nichols – who amuses and vexes me at the same time and our blogfather.
My current mastodon experience is now on-par with old twitter and while my follower count is still less than twitter – it is a lot more rewarding. My cat tweets have almost instant likes. :-
ETA
Occasionally, our blogfather says shit like this:
🤔🤔🤔
Pittsburgh MIke
Not disagreeing about Musk — he’s a flaming racist, and I don’t use Twitter at all. But I was puzzled by
I suppose it all depends upon the definition of the vague terms of “the master’s tools” and “genuine change,” but I’ve seen some pretty big changes in American (and other nations’) societies since I was a kid.
wjca
@Scout211:
Given Musk’s racist views, and his “intimate knowledge of the factory floors”, how could sweeping racism there be a surprise? Sounds like a case of “System working as designed.”
Alison Rose
It’s so fun being part of a group that has been hated to the point of multiple attempts at complete extermination for centuries upon centuries of existence.
However. I love being a Jew and this kind of shit makes me wanna be even Jewier. They can kish mir in tuchus.
Comrade Scrutinizer
Staying on X and giving it clicks enables monsters. I miss a lot of people I used to follow there. I found alternatives, or I said goodbye. I didn’t try to justify hanging out there. It’s really that simple.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
It’s very hard to kill a well established player like Twitter. It has the big advantage that all big social networks have: the value is in the network. People stay on Twitter because the people they want to follow are there, and the people they follow are there because there are followers to be had. The best chance of Twitter really failing is if they have an extended outage that encourages people to seek alternatives.
MisterDancer
The original essay gives more information; I didn’t include it because my point wasn’t really there, this post was long enough, and copies of the essay only exist in PDF format, online. But I’ll explain more, below:
Take it like this. If you build a system who’s primary goal is profit at nearly any cost — which is what all the major social media platforms are, these days — how can you build systems opposing them in them?
In this view, Twitter was always going to be a space where discussions about the ills of social media, or the larger society that thrives on same, would be tough to build, at best. And any such use of a system that seeks to subvert it’s for-profit goals, still pays into those goals.
That’s why I plugged in Gibson’s quote. Gibson is right, but he’s right because in that view where The Street finds uses the originator of a tool never envisioned, you do it our of desperation. The Street is always dis-empowered in Cyberpunk, always trapped in a cycle where the only tools available are ones from the Corporations. And Lorde’s quote just points out that if all you have are hammers — tools corporations give you to do the work they want you to do — you’re almost never going to properly do anything other than things a hammer is good at, no matter how you adapt that hammer.
That’s the trap of leaning on Twitter, or any corporate social media. They will never build a tool to make the kind of organizing we need to do, easier. They are always looking for That Next Dollar, and our work here is oftentimes in direct opposition to that profit motive. so we should not lean too heavily on those tools, to even gather information, much less plan.
We’re seeing, right now, the effects of that dependency. And that’s a key point about “the master’s tools”.
I hope you’ll understand I’m not tacking “genuine change” here, again, feel free to read the essay in full(PDF).
Chris
@Bill Arnold:
Yeah. With elections as close as they are these days, the mainstream media AND social media having turned violently anti-Biden augurs really badly.
dm
I was on Twitter for about two weeks in 2009 or so, but stopped because I had a bad case of FOMO that kept me glued to it. Deleted the app and never looked back.
I joined Mastodon last November because a friend started a Mastodon instance. It’s great, but still can be a time-sink if I’m not careful.
The problem with Mastodon is that one person’s experience can be very different from another’s. There’s a small, vocal, Black community that has had a rough go of it — assholes find them, and it’s a tiresome process to police your own feed, get your Mastodon host to limit the assholes’ access to you, and to get the assholes’ Mastodon hosts to discourage their activity. And who needs to deal with that?
Then there are tools that Black twitter likes, but which major Mastodon sites are reluctant to implement (quote-tweeting is a big one). There are Mastodon servers that support quote-tweeting, but who knows how to find one?
It’s not one big community, it’s a lot of little communities. Kind of reminds me of blogs and forums, really
But I view it as being intentionally designed to not be one of the masters’ tools.
cain
ha – John has a mastodon account – https://mastodon.social/@johngcole
fucker has 964 followers without posting anything.
Geminid
@wjca: “…intimate knowledge of factory floors” my ass. This really does sound like a puff piece. I bet Musk couldn’t last a day in one of his factories. That is, if he could pass a drug test, which he couldn’t.
Did Isaakson ask Musk about all the weed, Ketamine and designer drugs he consumes? That, I think, is a relevant part of the Musk story. The guy is skipping without a rope.
Roger Moore
@MisterDancer:
Tesla’s stock price scares me; there’s no reason for it to be anywhere close to where it is. IIRC, Tesla’s total market value is more than all the other car companies put together, which is just nonsense. The whole thing makes me think the whole thing is a gigantic bubble, which makes me wonder how many other stocks I haven’t been paying as careful attention to are in the same boat.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Rainbow in NYC.
If you’re Manhattan (Brooklyn or Queens too, probably), go outside, look east and up (it’s pretty high up).
The thing I like best about rainbows in NYC is that there are so many people here to see and share it. It seems like a mass community visual gift.
I expect that means there’ll be plenty of pictures online starting real soon / now. It’s kind faint, though, even by the translucent standards of rainbows, so the pics probably won’t be very good without some kind of enhancement.
Princess
Thank you for this.
Geminid
@Roger Moore: I’ve noticed that Cheryl Rofer has been prepping her followers with the other platform(s) she can be followed on. She hasn’t left Twitter yet though. Same with Laura Rozen.
Another person I liked to follow, Xeni Jardin, left Twitter last October as soon as it was clear that Musk would go through with the purchase. As far as I know, she has not appeared on another platform. But Jardin has health challenges and I can see how she might want to give social media a break.
LAO
Many years ago, could be 20 years, I attended, with my father, a Thomas Friedman lecture entitled (as best I remember) “The End of Anti-semitism”. Friedman spent about an hour arguing that ant-semitism was no longer a thing.
My dad and I didn’t agree on much politics wise but we both walked out of that lecture shaking our heads, in agreement that Tom Friedman was a moron.
I think of that lecture often.
LAO
@Lacuna Synecdoche: I can see it from my living room! Thanks for the heads up.
TS
@Scout211:
Sounds like it could be written by Ayn Rand
Keith P.
As toxic as it may be, this site *does* embed a lot of tweets.
cain
@Roger Moore: Since the dotcom boom – the stock market is treated just like gambling – speculation abounds. So everything about stocks like Tesla is about speculation. Same with Google. There is no reason for the stock price to be that high.
Chris
@LAO:
This feels like the kind of thing where if you have to make the argument, it’s probably not true.
No one’s ever had to tell me that anti-Catholicism wasn’t a thing anymore.
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
Islam apparently has very high regard for cats. There are stories about Muhammad and his favorite cat, Muezza. Apparently cats (unlike dogs) are considered to be inherently ritually clean, so they can enter mosques, and food and water they’ve tried remains halal.
Alison Rose
@Keith P.: This really doesn’t need to be noted every time there’s a post about Musk. As AL and Adam and others have said, there simply isn’t a reliable replacement source out of the multiple so-called Twitter replacements yet. It is still the place to go for info and commentary, especially on things like Ukraine. Embedding a tweet doesn’t endorse Musk’s bullshit any more than wishing your granny happy birthday on Facebook endorses Zuckerberg’s.
frosty
Somewhat on topic, and repeated from below: today is the 50th anniversary of the violent right wing overthrow of Chile’s legally elected government. The people lived and died with the results for the next 17 years.
Doug R
@Baud: Facebook is BLOCKING news links in Canada because they don’t want to pay news outlets a fraction of a cent on the dollar for the content they wrap their advertising on.
Facebook ALSO the personal data of MILLIONS including me to Cambridge Analytica who used it to help the Russians to help get trump elected.
FUCK Threads and FUCK Instagram.
Mr. Bemused Senior
I lost respect for him when he wrote his Crazier Than Thou column (9/11 response). I won’t link it.
rikyrah
There is a reason why he’s called Apartheid Clyde.
The work environment at Tesla was all I needed to Know.
I have been Black in America longer than 3 days.
So, the hatred allowed to be spewed towards Black folks ..that it got to “the Jews” is not a surprise.
The hatred ALWAYS SPREADS.
THE HATRED ALWAYS GETS TO ALL CONSIDERED
THE OTHER
Chris
@frosty:
Pretty much every conservative I’ve ever heard out about it thinks putting Pinochet in power was a wonderful thing that saved Chile from a far worse fate. Which should have sounded some alarm bells long before Trump.
frosty
@schrodingers_cat: I’m curious: If you’re seeing Twitter in Hindi, do you see the swarm of alt-Nazi and other right wing blue checks and bots, or are they only posting on tweets written in English? If not, then maybe there’s hope for it internationally.
tobie
With the Jewish new year just around the corner, I’m worried about safety at synagogues. Musk is stoking rightwing rage. Jews are the canary in the coal mine. No minority group is safe.
Scout211
Elon’s X is suing California for “free speech violation” because of the new social media transparency bill signed into law.
CNN
Geminid
@LAO: Adolf Hitler gave anti-Semitism a very bad name. But anti-Semitism did not vanish after the Second World War, it just went underground.
NotMax
While on the subject of so-called social media platforms, Threads blocks searches related to covid and vaccines as cases rise (WaPo link).
cokane
half the content here is embedded tweets. mostly from decent people but still… why?
if i wanted to check twitter, i’d check twitter. not a bad idea for BJ to revert to, you know, blog posts.
CliosFanBoy
@schrodingers_cat:
Didn’t dinesh d’souza come from that group too?
What’s the Indian version of “a fuck’n Tom.”??
Hungry Joe
@Alison Rose: My feelings exactly.
I was talking to my sister not long ago. We’re 65+, and neither of us can remember being the intended target of, or suffering in any way from so much as a single instance of antisemitism; the worst we could come up with was a remark here, a remark there — and nothing in the last couple of decades. But it was … well, not POUNDED into us, but made clear: Keep your guard up, your eyes open, your options up to date. You never know. Just because it’s not happening to me, right here and right now, doesn’t mean it’s not happening to someone else. Help them. Defend them. Because 1) it’s the right thing to do, and anyway, 2) guess who’s next.
LAO
@Geminid: As a Jewish American, I’ve lived a fairly sheltered life, I grew up in Westchester county New York, attended Penn and then law school in NYC. I live in NYC.
But I have had the honor of being the first Jewish person someone’s met. (One of my freshmen roommates). And, I have had to explain to many people that the phrase “Jew him down “ is actually anti-Semitic.
So yeah, it’s here to stay.
MagdaInBlack
@cokane: Perhaps you’d prefer a different blog as well. No one is forcing you to read this one.
CliosFanBoy
I posted a couple things on Twitter some years back but got swamped by trolls for even the most innocuous remark. I never logged back in.
Roger Moore
@cain:
Google’s stock price can at least be somewhat explained. It’s trading at a P/E of about 30, which is high by historical standards but is similar to companies like Apple and Walmart. Tesla’s is close to 80, which only makes sense if you assume it’s going to continue gaining profitability like crazy. That seems like a questionable assumption, especially given they’ve been lowering their prices recently to keep up sales.
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold:
Post on Semafor.com says Melon is throttling access to FTFNYT.
(via nycsouthpaw)
Cheers,
Scott.
LAO
@tobie: Almost 30 years ago, I was in Italy during the high holidays and decided to attend services at the synagogue in Florence. The most beautiful synagogue I’d ever seen. The entire synagogue was surrounded by Italian police carrying automatic weapons. To this day, I remember the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach entering the synagogue.
Of course that was long before the massacre in Pittsburgh.
Hungry Joe
@LAO: Check out the “If Books Could Kill” podcast on “The World Is Flat.” They do to Tom Friedman exactly what should be done to Tom Friedman. (My favorite line from the show: “Does he even know what a metaphor IS?”)
CliosFanBoy
@Hungry Joe:
One of my wife’s BFFs is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. She told us everyone in her family does two things (and we should too)…
1. Keep your passport up to date
2. Keep enough cash locked away to be able to get out of the country today if necessary.
Keith P.
@MagdaInBlack: The same can be said of Twitter, which is the point – if it’s so toxic, don’t use it.
LAO
@Hungry Joe: I will absolutely check it out. Thanks
Doc Sardonic
@Roger Moore: Interesting that a creature that spends as much time licking it’s asshole as a cat does can be considered ritually clean.
Chris
@Geminid:
I feel like the fact that anti-Semitism for so long was associated so strongly with German Nazis and, after that, Arab Nationalists (and, after THAT, islamists) didn’t help in some ways. If you’re American or British or French, it reinforces the notion that anti-Semitism is something that “they,” the geopolitical enemy of the day, do. Which means you don’t really need to learn anything about it other than “boy, those crazy krauts/ragheads sure are crazy, aren’t they? I guess we just need to keep shooting those motherfuckers in the face until America prevails!”
You really see this among Republicans and Mideast policy. Republicans are genuinely offended, and utterly baffled, that all the Arab countries they bomb haven’t brought the Jewish vote any closer to them. To them (at least those that aren’t full blown swastika types), being good to Jews meaning killing a shit ton of a few specific types of swarthy foreigners, and they can’t understand why they’re not rewarded for it.
MagdaInBlack
@Keith P.: Just stop. You complainers are tedious
Honestly, if you don’t like the format, don’t read it. Go find a news source that doesn’t use twitter posts.
tobie
@LAO: It is heartbreaking. I lived on and off in Germany for 12 years, and synagogues were always guarded. First it seemed ceremonial bur later it felt like the sites were vulnerable. With the rise of the AfD and the synagogue shooting in Halle in 2019, it felt absolutely necessary. I never expected to have this anxiety here but I do now. It breaks my heart.
Omnes Omnibus
@frosty: I am still on Twitter, and I plan to stay as long as the main effective outlet for communication disadvantaged and marginalized groups. That being said, I keep a close watch on my feeds and do not let the algorithm push content at me. I have not seen a lot of Nazis or any other nasties.
LAO
@CliosFanBoy: When my father was alive, he used to keep a considerable amount of money locked in a safe and I jokingly referred to it as his “the nazis are coming money.” He just looked at me and said “yup.” I had no comeback but I’m sure I rolled my eyes. I was an asshole teenager.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris:
Um, Americans, French, and British have their own history with anti-Semitism. Pretending that we don’t is naive.
schrodingers_cat
frosty: Indian Twitter was infested with BJP IT cell bots and bhakts long before Musk took over. I stopped engaging with them after my first week of tweeting. It was quite bad to begin with. It has become harder to get haters banned that’s true
Indian RWNJs worship the state of Israel. More recently I have seen them using antisemitic dog whistles about George Soros
Marathi Twitter is relatively bot and bhakt free.
Roger Moore
@rikyrah:
A bigot against one kind of people is a lot more likely to be bigoted against other kinds of people. IMO, this is why Jewish people tend to care about fighting bigotry even when we aren’t the direct target. We may not be at the top of every bigot’s hate list, but if they get a chance to go down the list they’ll very likely get to us before too long. Better to stop them before that happens.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
… yes, that’s my whole point. As long as there were MORE virulent strands of anti-Semitism (or at least more famous strands of anti-Semitism), not only in other countries, but countries they saw as enemies, they didn’t feel any need to look at their own.
Jay
@Alison Rose:
when you post a twitter link, and somebody clicks on it, it drives traffic and adds to the views,
if you screen shot it, you can embed it in posts, but it doesn’t drive traffic.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
Trump tried to pull this with the gay and Muslim votes too. He told the gays he’d protect us from Shariah Law or whatever was the en vogue way to claim the Muslims were coming for our freedoms at the time.
Then he told the Muslims he would protect their religious freedoms to discriminate against gay people.
It didn’t occur to anyone that someone could read both these things and be disgusted by the obvious hypocrisy. Clearly they were also banking on the notion that “every member of every minority group would, if they could, be as hateful as the worst of our supporters.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: Sorry, I meant to amplify your point, not imply that you were unaware of the issue.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ah, OK, sorry. All on the same page now.
MisterDancer
DAMN FUCKING RIGHT.
RE: My fellow front pagers’ use of Twitter. I ain’t no one’s Daddy, and they post so much content that, as others note, is hard to grab and consolidate outside the service. I even referenced this IN MY POST.
Much like climate change, the solution is not as simple as yelling at people, or shaming them. Use of Twitter is complex and messy and has valid use cases, even in this era. Shaming and passive-aggressivly naming ain’t the solve here.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Spotify sent me email today titled something like “we have content for you, right up your alley!”
There were two podcasts they thought were right up my alley, and one was Joe Rogan. Big NOPE!
I immediately clicked the take me off your fucking list button.
They aren’t just offering him a platform, they are promoting that crap.
Baud
@NotMax:
Well, so much for that then.
tobie
A Jan 6 defendant has claimed he can’t get a fair trial in DC because there aren’t enough blue collar trades people in the city:
Obviously what he means is that there are not enough white blue collar workers in the city. DC has plenty of working class people.
Also…one of the reasons I hate when politicians give a shout out to small business is that so many “Joe, the Plumber” types like this defendant are rabid rightwingers.
Keith P.
@MagdaInBlack: By that same token, if internet comments get you this worked up, don’t read them!
eversor
@Roger Moore:
Tesla is more than just cars. Their charging stations are great, and for those lucky enough to own homes they sell battery packs which back solar power.
Elon has not been building a car company. He’s been builing a government funded green energy monopoly and we have all been paying for it.
Righteous Hazard
I really appreciate that folks here are doing their best to minimize the use of twitter. I also know that there is a reality that are communities and people, some of whom are marginalized and vulnerable to having communications cut off, and who can’t just up and leave that platform.
But for those who can leave, and are irritated at dumbass scolds like me for our continued complaints about embedded twitter content, here’s something to consider. Imagine being told that the price of engagement on a site that ISNT twitter is having to look at the equivalent of a billionaire oligarch’s personally branded nazi flag or confederate flag frequently framing content.
I know I’m welcome to fuck off, but I think that this is a cool place otherwise, and I hope that other good options become available for front pagers soon.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Bill Arnold:
Musk interfered with and prevented the success of a defensive wartime attack by a US ally, Ukraine, against against an expansionist and increasingly fascist Russia – after speaking with Russian officials, purportedly including Putin. In other words, Musk self-admittedly communicated with a US enemy, and gave it aid and comfort in a time of war against one of our allies.
And nothing happened (so far), aside from some easily ignored public criticism.
So, not only will Musk believe he could get away with election interference via algorithm on Twitter if he tried, he knows it.
Baud
@Righteous Hazard:
You know us so well.
Redshift
@Righteous Hazard:
I think we all hope that, but hoping that is not the same as the all-too-frequent insistence that there must be some alternative that the people who produce our wonderful content could use.
MisterDancer
@Righteous Hazard: When I say Twitter is toxic, that’s to ensure people are aware and making informed choices. It’s not to point fingers and demand everyone feel guilt for using it — or leave.
I live in a society that forces me, as a Black person, to use and abet systems that have a long history of being toxic to Black folx. I would be a grand hypocrite to demand y’all stop using Twitter, given what it provides for a lot of marginalized people, still.
But those people are Under Threat using Twitter, and that threat is growing. I have the privilege of telling Musk Nope, but a lot of people do not. And it is for those people I post up, and try to raise awareness, because — as I say at the end of the piece — this is not something with easy answers.
Frankensteinbeck
Yeah, that’s conclusive. The idea that the ADL has the power to damage Twitter is so unhinged from reality that it only makes sense if you think a Jewish conspiracy controls the world. Otherwise the claim is ludicrous.
This is not going to happen. It never happens, despite it being a constant prediction when conservatives do something awful. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have to. The attacks will get less sophisticated, and Twitter will drown, inch by inch, in a sewer of open hate.
At least, as long as Musk is willing to pour his own money in bathtub fulls into propping it up. A clear message from this mess is that advertisers definitely do not like their name appearing next to a shwastika and have not been coming back.
@Scout211:
Says the man baby who threw a venomous public tantrum when his offer of a submarine to help a flooded cave rescue was refused. The only person with a thinner skin than Musk is Donald Trump.
rikyrah
She is preaching an entire sermon.
They fed you racism, and picked your pockets clean.👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZT8jJHTbP/
Alison Rose
@tobie: My local synagogue, where I attend virtual services, has had to step up security both in-person and virtually (not doing FB lives, password-protecting livestreams elsewhere, etc) after threats and incidents at other Bay Area temples. I’m sure they’re doing even more for the high holy days.
Alison Rose
@LAO: Had this said in front of me by a coworker once, and when I tried to explain to her why it was bad, she said “But I didn’t mean in THAT way” and I was like…my babe, there is only way to mean it.
Brachiator
@WaterGirl:
Spotify paid a lot of money for Joe Rogan. From the NYT…
They have to push him to get their money’s worth.
Bobby Thomson
Last fall, people literally were wondering out loud how long it would take Elon to blame everything on the Jews.
trollhattan
@Righteous Hazard: Got a ride in a Tesla the other day, which delivered us both safely. I also read Twitter content, inside browsers.
They both exist and will not be avoidable until they cease to exist and I have no way to hasten the day.
frosty
@frosty: From an editorial in the Grauniad today. Sound like another country we know?
A decade ago, polls suggested that one in eight people in Chile did not see the ousting of a democratically elected leader as wrong. That’s now more than one in three.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/11/the-guardian-view-on-the-other-911-pinochets-dictatorship-casts-a-lengthening-shadow
schrodingers_cat
Don’t people know how to curate their Twitter feeds? You can still block and mute handles and words. I use both those buttons generously.
Scout211
O/T: Alabama has filed an appeal to SCOTUS
tobie
@Alison Rose: I’ve been to a few synagogues in Florida which had police protection. The first sabbath after my father’s death my whole family went to synagogue to say kaddish. There was police protection. My father was a Holocaust survivor. The irony that his house of worship needed security guards was not lost on me. Who expected we’d go hurtling back 50 years in the blink of the eye?
JaneE
I think Musk bought Twitter in order to make it what it is fast becoming. No evidence really but how much can some one person screw up accidentally?
Baud
@JaneE:
Bad flashback to my last performance review.
Redshift
@MisterDancer: Thank you. I spend more time on Mastodon than Twitter these days, and have found a fair amount of what I want out of social media over there, though not as much as I would like. But there are things I do not care to give up, so I do spend some time on the hellsite (which isn’t too hellish for me, because I stay off the algorithm feed, and I rarely do original tweets, so I don’t seem to attract much attention from the haters.
I don’t dispute any of the characterizations of what’s objectionable, and I’m not interested in a big argument, but I’m also pretty down on the boycott mentality that is extremely prevalent these days, and not just about Twitter. Boycotts work if they have significant support and are communicated to the target. Personal boycotts (and don’t get me wrong, I do quite a few of them) mostly let one feel better about oneself. Yes, withholding your clicks/traffic does make a very tiny amount of difference, and if lots of people do the same, it will make a big difference. But that’s a very big “if,” and all the evidence seems to be that Twitter is being hurt a lot more by advertisers not wanting their content to be next to nazis (a direct consequence of muskrat’s actions.)
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Reports are Aaron Rodgers fractured his ankle.
Jets got no shot.
RaflW
Since OT:
LOL my BF is losing it. “I’m going to walk to the mailbox and back, even though we don’t have one.”
RaflW
Since OT:
LOL my BF is losing it. “I’m going to walk to the mailbox and back, even though we don’t have one.”
(ETA: It is true we don’t have one.)
MisterDancer
I do — or did before I left. I also used BotSentinel.
I didn’t wish to engage in what, given my array of diverse interests, what would have been a running firefight with a diminished Twitter service. My gut said that I would not care for seeing a vast increase in racist content, even with the filtering I could put in place. And yeah, didn’t want to personally support Musk in this way.
MisterDancer
This is a case where I support the adage to not ascribe to malice that which has…other explanations.
Musk actually has a long and sordid history of failing when it comes to software/online plays. And those historical failures are of the same level of ego and lack of forethought that we see with Twitter, today.
So no, knowing of Musk’s past before Tesla, this makes terrifying sense.
schrodingers_cat
@MisterDancer: If I only depended on Twitter for news in the US I would do the same. I subscribe to WashPost, that and Balloon Juice keeps me pretty well informed.
Alison Rose
@tobie: That is heartbreaking. And then today I find out Cynthia McKinney is a full-blown Nazi. I never exactly supported her but I didn’t have particular feelings about her at all, and then I read that not only is she doing this now, but she has been for years.
It’s exhausting knowing so many people want you dead because of the insane bullshit fantasies they’ve chosen to believe about you.
Righteous Hazard
@MisterDancer: “— this is not something with easy answers.”
That is true, and I am a douche if I sound like I’m saying otherwise.
And I know that Billionaire shitheads are nothing new. But I also think that we often we are not aware of the moment a boat goes from taking water and slowly sinking, to rapidly plunging.
I dunno how best to get people to the lifeboats, but I think it is time to stop wondering, and to help get as many as possible to the lifeboats by any means necessary.
raven
@Alison Rose: At least 20 years.
Betty Cracker
I’m surprised none of the would-be Twitter-killer platforms have replicated the functionality and scalability needed to lure official accounts to an alternative. I have no idea how any of this works, but apparently functions like video, cross-platform embedding, etc., are a lot harder to accomplish than I realized.
Musk has been begging someone to eat his lunch with his awful behavior, deliberate degradation of the user experience and deliberate provocations of accounts he needs to keep his platform viable, but so far, no one has definitively stepped up.
As for getting people off Twitter, IMO, a competitor that lures the official accounts off will take care of the masses at the same time. As long as just about every politician, official agency, weather service, media outlet, brand, school, law enforcement org, etc., stays on Twitter, people who want up-to-date info will stay on. Move the bigs off, and the littles will self-deport.
Righteous Hazard
@trollhattan: I got nothing either, although I know a spaceX engineer who advises his family members against buying teslas, for engineering safety reasons.
Maybe that’s what Im saying. Keeping people safe doesn’t mean I want to tell them what to do, on twitter or with what car they ride.
tobie
@Alison Rose: I knew McKinney was a human rights advocate for Palestinians but didn’t know she questioned whether 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, nor her stunt today promoting an event asking whether blacks and whites can unite against a common enemy represented by the Star of David. This is naked, rancid antisemitism. How did McKinney get so unhinged? I can imagine your shock discovering all of this. It is shocking.
Alison Rose
@tobie: It’s always extra painful to see this sort of “common enemy” shit coming from Black folks. I remember being very proud when I learned that many white Jewish lawyers from New York went South during the Civil Rights Movement to provide aid. We know what it’s like to be hated for who you are, and we (most of us) adhere to tikkun olam
ETA: To be clear, there are certainly racist Jews. I’d never claim otherwise. But they’re a minority, as far as I’ve seen of my communities.
Eyeroller
@WaterGirl:
Spotify spent a huge amount of money for Joe Rogan, they have to promote him.
Tim Ellis
I understand why people stay on Twitter, but I strongly believe it’s strategically important to be building alternatives as much as possible.
Bluesky is I think the most viable contender at this point; I love Mastodon and it certainly feels most politically aligned with me, but it needs a lot of work and I’m not sure it’s going to get it.
tobie
@Alison Rose: Scapegoating crosses all boundaries. I guess we all need someone to blame and history provides a lot of ready-made examples. Still, it didn’t have to be this way. We live in shitty times. I’m glad I was a kid in the 1970s. In hindsight that feels like such a hopeful time.
Bill Arnold
@Alison Rose:
The first sentence of her wikipedia bio is currently “Cynthia Ann McKinney (born March 17, 1955) is an American politician, academic, and conspiracy theorist.[1] ”
Probably will get edited out quickly.
Alison Rose
@Bill Arnold: Good Lord. “I’m a kook and proud of it!!”
Tehanu
I still have my Twitter account but I only use it to view & “like” posts that other people embed here and/or on Lawyers Guns & Money. I never tweet any more at all. When I do post my final tweet, it will probably be something like “F. you, Leon Skum.”
rikyrah
@Roger Moore:
That’s right.
It will always get around to your doorstep… If you aren’t White.
Dmbeaster
Just wow.
I recommend reading the link “this post” as it is perilous not to see the primary source as to just how bad this is.
Holy crap. This is literally Nazis in Germany in the 1920s. Only sponsored by Musk today.
Ruckus
I was addicted to twit, till SFB2 bought it. I haven’t closed my account because on rare occasions like here, I see twits that are worth looking at. But I used to be on twit 2-4 hrs a day. Now I’m on it maybe 10-15 minutes a week.
@Dmbeaster:
It seems the money is capable of creating humans with basically all the bad traits and none of the even half way sane, or at least tolerable traits. Take SFB, and SFB2 – PLEASE
glc
@Keith P.: That’s what I was thinking myself. Someone is having a bad day.
Happens to me quite a bit too. There’s lots to be grumpy about.
Ruckus
So OK I gotta ask, is there a way to remove your account from twitter?
Because I don’t see any actual way.
OK I just changed everything. I was born on 1/1/1903……
So I’m no longer a twit and have somewhat at least inactivated my account. Other than that I can’t see how you actually delete an account.
Ruckus
@CliosFanBoy:
Never heard that but I’m up to date.
Ruckus
@Frankensteinbeck:
I’d love to close my twitter account. I can find no actual way to do that. Maybe I haven’t worked hard enough. But I’ve changed all my info and as I say at #137 and I’m now 120 yrs old. Talk about having old fartitus.
Ruckus
@JaneE:
They can screw up a lot and not accept one smidgen of honesty about it whatsoever. They are people.
It is one of either the hardest or easiest things to believe about people is that they can be complete fuckups and not have a clue why everything in their life is completely fucked up. It has been this way since there were more than two of us and it will be this way till there is no one left to hear the last person complain.
Ruckus
@JaneE:
They can screw up a lot and not accept one smidgen of honesty about it whatsoever. They are people.
It is one of either the hardest or easiest things to believe about people is that they can be complete fuckups and not have a clue why everything in their life is completely fucked up. It has been this way since there were more than two of us and it will be this way till there is no one left to hear the last person complain.
LiminalOwl
@Hungry Joe: Me too. All of this (except I’m slightly younger.)
More on Musk and anti-Semitism. Link to Substack, not Xitter. https://open.substack.com/pub/popularinformation/p/the-truth-about-elon-musk-and-anti?r=1mqsc&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
MisterDancer
@LiminalOwl: Hi! That’s literally the same article as the 2nd link in my post. :)
(I happen to be a proud reader of Popular Info, and have used their work in prior posts here.)
MisterDancer
@Ruckus: Removing an Twiiter account these days appears to be a multi-step process: https://www.androidpolice.com/delete-twitter-account/
To sum up — you have to deactivate the account, then wait 30 days.
Ben Cisco
@piratedan: I’d like one of those Bluesky invites if you still have them.
benjaminlcsico at the gmail place