You really need to get off of Twitter

[solarbird]

If you're still on Twitter, you really need to leave.

Over the last several days, Elon has continued having extensive online discussions with fascists and far-right authoritarians who want queers dead. The response to the Colorado mass shooting against LGBT people amongst people he is talking to was mostly "good;" the big meme of the day a couple of days ago was the "woodchipper" meme, involving throwing queers into woodchippers.

Since then, he's been restoring more virulently anti-LGBT and white nationalist accounts, while banning antifascist and left accounts at scale.

But he's really opening the floodgates this coming week, pledging a mass restoration of accounts banned for harassment and threats:

The mass return of users who had been banned for such offenses as violent threats, harassment and misinformation will have a significant impact on the platform, experts said. And many questioned how such a resurrection would be handled, given that it’s unclear what Musk means by “egregious spam” and the difficulty of separating out users who have “broken the law,” which vary widely by jurisdiction and country.

“Apple and Google need to seriously start exploring booting Twitter off the app store,” said Alejandra Caraballo, clinical instructor at Harvard Law’s cyberlaw clinic. “What Musk is doing is existentially dangerous for various marginalized communities. It’s like opening the gates of hell in terms of the havoc it will cause. People who engaged in direct targeted harassment can come back and engage in doxing, targeted harassment, vicious bullying, calls for violence, celebration of violence. I can’t even begin to state how dangerous this will be.”

Fundamentally, he's turning it into a font of fascist and christo-fascist disinformation, harassment, and violence.

Which means:

It's time to leave.

Comments

[jessie_c]

His Saudi and Russian backers must be very pleased with him.

[solarbird]

The Saudis in particular, I think.

I imagined it would turn into Parler. I honestly think right now he's aiming for infinity-chan.

[jessie_c]

I've seen mentions of '$8-Chan'.

[solarbird]

(trivia: eight-chan was at least originally officially infinity-chan, or at least talked about as such on it. the eight was an infinity, rotated 90 degrees, since you couldn't use an infinity sign in a domain name.)

(bonus trivia: yes, if it's not obvious, I have spent real amounts of time in some really, really bad parts of the web.)

(double-bonus writing trivia: i put a /pol/ meme in one of my stories as bait, to see if anyone would get it. and yes: i caught one.)

[solarbird]

all that said: I like $8 chan now that I get it, which I didn't when I first started seeing it on mastodon.

[kathmandu]

Russian I understand, but how do you see it serving the Saudis' interest?

[solarbird]

The Saudis are a much bigger player in international authoritarianism than is generally recognised, and Twitter has been a big pain in the ass for them, as well as for many other authoritarians. The amount of organisation and mobilisation on the platform has been incredibly valuable.

Until now.

[kathmandu]

I see. Sigh.

Thank you for explaining.

[maellenkleth]

I salted my account with long strings of random numbers and left. Fuck all Nazis, especially Musk.

I shall never again knowingly do business with that fuckmuppet.

[dewline]

And he's drawing LEO attention to himself in terrifying ways, I suspect. From Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

https://twitter.com/mmasnick/status/1595687229774385152

[solarbird]

A lawyer that rather successfully brought facebook to heel in Europe replied to an earlier one of his posts - about how everything was fair game now but wouldn't be "promoted" meaning the harassment and threats would be invisible except to the people getting hit by them - with a thank you, telling him that he'd definitely be using that in court, as proof of intent to violate European law.

[dewline]

This may partly explain why Musk has had the Brussels offices of Twitter closed down. The closure likely won't shield him from all consequences, we hope.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/24/twitter-brussels-office-elon-musk-eu-questions

(Get off-platform, get off-platform!)

[oh6]

Yes. I broke my resolve to avoid social media to the extent of browsing various Twitter accounts, and have been seeing people going from "I'm staying" to "I may not be staying and here's a crash course on Mastodon / Tumblr" over the past week.

Re: (Get off-platform, get off-platform!)

[solarbird]

Not enough. Way too many people, including people I know personally, are standing pat.

[stormehowl]

I always wanted to believe that deep down he was a good person. That the stupid crap from his mouth was all epic trolling. Which in itself was a red flag but I still wanted to believe that even he had a limit to depravity. I was pleased when he set up internet for Ukraine and still foots the bill (though does it openly grudgingly now). But now ... I'm just so disgusted with him. I never got into twitter (though I have some old account that hasn't been accessed in years. I would hope that anyone decent would leave and not support a platform full of white nationalism.