I thought the whole point of being right wing was being negative?
When your whole identity is consumed by boundless, baseless, joyless hatred of “the other”, yes, you’re gonna be negative.
I don’t believe Musk is controlled by any of that though. He might share in it, but it doesn’t quite dictate him as much as it dictates those in actual misery. For example, he isn’t actually opposed to letting immigrants in, if they’ll make him richer. He’s motivated by greed and grift, and no small helping of pride.
I suspect he just doesn’t want people criticising him and his cronies. Particularly when they inevitably start enacting policies that affect their base negatively (we’ve already seen our share of face-eating leopard voters shocked to find out that their face isn’t off limits), social media could help pissed off people realise how many others are pissed off too. I don’t think I need to spell out why that could be dangerous for him.
Better to quell dissent entirely. If nobody can complain about the government, it’s harder to organise against it. Suppress criticism, censor the media, manipulate what you get to see to shape your view…
(Obligatory note that calling a dictatorship communism doesn’t make it less authoritarian than a capitalist dictatorship. Red boots hurt just as much as any other color if they step on your neck, no matter how tasty they might be. That has nothing to do with the topic, I’m just bracing for tankie whataboutisms.)
I was being slightly sarcastic cause right wing folk seem to be very negative, or nostalgic, but in a negative sense. But I get your point.
Oh you’re absolutely right, I just felt like spelling out the subtext of “Musk isn’t in it for the right wing mentality, just for the power” that I thought you were hinting at but left unsaid. I wasn’t trying to contradict you at all, but rather to expand on your setup.
Don’t want any Debbie-downers on Shitter once his bestie is in the big chair.
I’m curious whether Truth Social will acquire Xitter, or vice versa.
And when.
Ah, so he’s going to stop posting there? Right?
my puppet is in power — everyone be nice now.
Now that the election is over and we won, let’s remove our bots. - musk
Oh, c’mon, who’s going to tell him he is the best dad? He needs them.
I mean, he will on an alt.
Ah, but there are still elections in other parts of the world, like Germany, where he is also very active
No, bots are still needed for hating illegal immigrants.
Immigration hate causing backlash against H1Bs, abort, abort!
The bots are removed! All 9 users (8 of them are EM sockpuppets) celebrate!
He’s shutting down his account?
No he’s gonna ban anyone who disagrees with him.
That ain’t going to turn down the negativity though
Instead of “bad” you have to say “ungood” from now on.
Double plus ungood!
“Maybe if you tell me the bad news in a good way, it won’t sound so bad.”
The bad news in a good way. Yes, I can do that. The bad news in a good way. Well, here it goes…
free speech absolutist
Free speech abolitionist, more like.
No no, guys, you’re misunderstanding. He MEANS there’s too much negativity from people saying things like “X sucks since musk bought twitter…”
He’s going to change those people’s tweets to say “X is great!”
And by that I mean he’s going to have a team to edit tweets that he doesn’t like!
If that’s not free speech, then Musk doesn’t know what is!
This is exactly what he means.
Next up the sanctioned daily hate.
This has nothing to do with Twitters image. He could have enforced that decision sooner if it was. This is about Trump. The negativity was helpful during Bidens presidency. Now that Trump is about to take over everything has to look like the world is happy again. It’s political manipulation.
It is all good now. Our elections are suddenly secure and our economy is great!
A team? You mean ChatGPT?
…also yes.
I mean in principle this is just a matter of moderation being different from censorship.
But really, an “algorithm tweak”? I am still wondering when or why who decided that we needed to have “algorithms” that someone could “tweak” on the Internet at all. The first kind of “social media” I ever used was web forums where the entire “algorithm” was thread bumping, and even if you insist that we need to have the structure of a microblog: Mastodon does fine without an “algorithm” beyond reverse-chronological sorting.
I think Mastodon does fine, too, but I’ve often heard people complain about the lack of an algorithm. Like, they don’t know how to find things if they aren’t being shoveled into their feed
Personally I follow slightly more than 100 accounts plus less than 10 hashtags and feel I’m already getting plenty of things into my feed, nowadays I tend to unfollow things that post too many irrelevant things more than I follow new ones.
But you had all these rightwing weirdos complaining they were being censored because “the algorithm” didn’t promote their weird little ideas enough!
Back when.
So tweaking the algorithm is quite literally censorship!Not that this “free-speech absolutist” has proven particularly true to his word.
I strongly agree with the point made in the linked article that censorship is when a sender wants to send something, the receiver wants to receive it, but a third party (government, social media platform, whoever) keeps them from doing so.
If I want to see “weird little ideas of rightwing weirdos” (or of leftwing weirdos or any others), I should be allowed to. If I don’t, I shouldn’t have to.
Incumbent wants everyone to talk about how great things are.
Removed by mod
If there’s going to be fantasies about murder, can his whole posse go out?
It’d be great if they all got together for Jonestown 2.0.
If someone were to poison the food at mar a lago, that person would have done more for this country than anybody else in the past 50 years.
Gotta catch that starship to Mars!
This is a fantasy about suicide but… yes.
Wish I could know what this said before it was censored
Check out the mod log.
Just looked: regardless of your personal opinion the comment is a breach of the terms of posting. It essentially said Musk should permanently retire himself from life.
It said basically the equivalent of musk should piss on the 3rd rail. Mods arbitrarily removed my comment, probably because it included the phrase ‘kill himself’, while allowing these various replies that aren’t qualitatively different. Mods do need to feel important.
Esteemed fellows as regarded as they are do have to show a presence I guess. There are no good billionaires afterall
X/Twitter is a misinformation platform. If you know a major influencer that uses, consider informing and directing them to the ActivityPub alternatives, even advertising on their platforms if you can.
I like how you say “that uses” instead of “that uses it” because the former generally implies drug use.
Good point, best to leave it like that 🙃
Sadly we lost that fight to the other centralised platform in Bluesky
Anything that’s not Twitter is good
Blue sky (and just about anything else) is an improvement, but remember, there is no bottom, things can always be worse. Truth Social and Gab both still exist.
These websites, because they are all centralized, are all ultimately moderated in accordance with the whims of their owners, the effect of which was thrown into sharp relief after Apartheid Willy Wonka bought Twitter.
With a federated platform like Mastodon, no single owner would be able to do this. If an instance suddenly became terrible, they could be de-federated and they’d lose their reach.
Of course, if one instance became particularly large, the ‘whims of the owner’ problem would come right back, but at least the alternatives would still be readily available.
