How to have a good time on Twitter:
Failing that, here’s a suggest blocklist of terms.
Relatedly: While I no longer actively post on Twitter, I do (confession) have a specific list of political commentators I use to keep up with The Great Horse Race. Realising that I could just straight-up block accounts that show me ads, in which case I’d never seen their ads again in my timeline, 100% improved the experience of indulging my vice…
The Section 230 versus Executive Order… thing is such a team no-one situation. Trump is a monster. Big social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are actively harmful monopolies and should be regulated out of existence. Section 230 itself is… fine, if flawed. If this EO actually happens1 literally the only effect it will have is driving social media companies off shore. By which I mean “killing current US-centric on-shore social media companies” and “opening the market to for e.g. ByteDance.”2
On the other hand, this pretty much has the potential to put the GOP exactly where they don’t want to be, i.e. mediating between Cult45 on one side and billionaires on the other. Their voting base versus their paychecks. So, like… again, who knows.
2020 needs to just… not. For a little while. Y’know?
Edit: Also, this. It is literally just a bottomless well of petty, vindictive cruelty…
Your regularly scheduled reminder that Twitter is a cesspit that actively makes the world worse and that there are significantly better alternatives.
Disclaimer: I still have a Twitter account though it’s mostly a placeholder. I use it mostly for promotion and following a bunch of journalists as a kind of lazy cross-publication newsfeed.1 But all casual/social/personal stuff goes to Mastodon.
Also, relatedly: get off of Twitter while you’re at it…
There is something undeniably reassuring about pinning the blame for a frightening and dangerous problem on a single individual. It doesn’t make the problem go away, but it does make it comprehensible. If you believe that you can pinpoint exactly why and how things came to be so broken, if you can trace it back like a single thread in a dandy’s coat, you can pretend to yourself, even briefly, that those problems be fixed.
In fact, taking a dramatically reductive view of the past is very much in keeping with a particular kind of anti-intellectualist sentiment — the one that assumes, or pretends to assume, that no one actually likes “difficult” books or movies or art, and that they are only saying they do in order to seem smart or trick someone into having sex with them. There is a lot of it going around, lately, a lot of people trying and failing to strike a tonally consistent register that lies somewhere between “I am sophisticated enough to complicatedly enjoy things that stupid people like” and “Fuck you for even suggesting that it is possible to draw a distinction between smart things and dumb things: they are the same.”
Rosa Lyster on difficulties.
This is in response to the rise of what the author refers to as Buckle Up Twitter and what anyone who’s ever been on Tumblr for more than five seconds will recognize as “Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck authorial voice repurposed by teenagers having Baby’s First Revelation about [insert random socio-historical issue here].”1
tag:stucky sort-by:kudos. [↩]In a study by George Washington University comparing white nationalists and ISIS social media usage, Twitter’s freedom of speech was not granted to ISIS. Twitter suspended 1,100 accounts related to ISIS whereas it suspended only seven accounts related to Nazis, white nationalism, and white supremacy, despite the accounts having more than seven times the followers, and tweeting 25 times more than the ISIS accounts. Twitter here made a moral judgment that the fewer, less active, and less influential ISIS accounts were somehow not welcome on their platform, whereas the prolific and burgeoning Nazi and white supremacy accounts were.
So, Twitter has shown that it won’t protect free speech at all costs or for all users. We can only conclude that Twitter is either intentionally protecting white supremacy or simply doesn’t think it’s very dangerous. Regardless of which it is (I think I know), the outcome does not change the fact that white supremacy is running rampant on its platforms and many others.
Tatiana Mac asks whose peaches?
On a charitable reading, it’s possible Twitter experiences more direct legal pressure (e.g. from law enforcement and/or intelligence agencies) to shut-down certain types of extremist content than others, which is a manifestation of shitty trends within the broader sociopolitical spectrum but also, on the flip side, not exactly exonerating…
A conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can be incredibly disorienting. Not because he’s particularly clever or thought-provoking, but because he sounds like he should be. He takes long pauses before he speaks. He furrows his brow, setting you up for a considered response from the man many have called a genius. The words themselves sound like they should probably mean something, too. Dorsey is just hard enough to follow that it’s easy to assume that any confusion is your own fault, and that if you just listen a little more or think a little harder, whatever he’s saying will finally start to make sense.
Whether Dorsey does this all deliberately or not, the reason his impassioned defenses of Twitter sound like gibberish is because they are.
Ashley Feinberg @s Jack.
Wo-oo-oo-ow, lol.
It’s not a “thread” it’s a badly formatted blog post.
I won’t lie; I’ve always kind of wondered1 about the idea of buying followers for someone else’s social media account as a weapon against their reputation.
