Elon Musk, speaking at a conference in Paris, said that he bought Twitter Inc. because the social network was having a “corrosive effect” on civil society that he hoped to improve, apparently by literally recruiting Nazis and other fascists, ramping up hate speech and harassment against people of colour, Jews, and women, and making it by far the worst major social media platform when it comes to LGBTQ+ safety by doing things like actively promoting anti-LGBT groups and pushing anti-trans propaganda into the feeds of over a hundred million people.
Of course, to him, we are the corrosion, so I suppose it makes a kind of sense.
What doesn’t make a lot of sense is Steve Huffman of Reddit seeing Musk’s handling of Twitter “as an example for Reddit to follow,” unless, like Musk, he’s pivoting to some variation of full-on authoritarian bastard mode.
To wit: “Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said, even as his actions brought widespread protest and unrest, and as Musk Twitter is being evicted from offices due to unpaid rent. Not to even mention the loss of the bulk of its advertisers and almost two-thirds of the value of the company.
He can even lie like a mofo and say, “We, even in disagreement, we appreciate that users can care enough to protest on Reddit [and] can protest on Reddit” while simultaneously threatening the protesting moderators behind the scenes and also reverting and/or undeleting individual-user-edited or deleted posts en masse directly against those users’ wishes. (This may be illegal in Europe, lawyers are trying to figure that out now.)
Huffman’s not being real political about this yet, other than the “STOP TALKING TO EACH OTHER AND GIVE ME YOUR FUCKING MONEY” course change, but a lot of hard turns to authoritarianism start with GIVE ME YOUR FUCKING MONEY, so now he’s on my watch list. I’ve logged out of reddit, and have signed up on kbin. It’s rocky going so far as they only went live like literally… a month and a half ago? And it shows. But I like the software, rough edges and all, and I want to be ready.
And I’m definitely not interested in giving Reddit any more content. What you do, well – that’s your call. Do what you’re comfortable with, it’s fine, it’s not some kind of Nazi farm.
Yet.
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