It’s not enough for some journalists and influencers to boycott the social media site formerly known as Twitter. Everyone needs to bail on it at once.
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Despite his lofty libertarian claims of a year ago, X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk has put his finger on the scale in countless ways to boost far-right posts and deprecate others — starting with his own posts.
He has made over 50 false election claims so far this year, and amplified countless posts of misinformation, conspiracy theorizing and antisemitism. He’s done nothing to stop Russian use of the platform to sow misinformation (and, we now know, the targeting of left-leaning American Jews) in support of Trump. He has complied with censorship requests from authoritarian-led Turkey while defying democratic Brazil and the European Union. He has filed frivolous SLAPP lawsuits against those who have pushed for a boycott. He has boosted nationalists in India, China and Argentina and received business favors from each. He helped foment violence in the United Kingdom, spreading misinformation and predicting “civil war.” And so on.
Yet, for all the actions that have been proposed — demanding advertisers boycott the service, going after SpaceX or Tesla or Starlink — the most obvious one often goes unsaid: we should stop using X.
I’m doing my part!
I love how my general disinterest and lack of participation is a virtue from time to time. Just like when I refused to watch that sport event in the middle east.
I feel you. Like 10 years ago I was trying to figure out the best way to let some friends know when pirated media hit the share i gave them access to. Some had discord, some didn’t, some had slack, some didn’t. Everyone could view tweets back then, even without an account, and the application I was using had twitter webhooks built in.
I made an account and used it solely for webhooks tweeting out what movies and shows hit the server, and what format/resolution they were. Everything was fine for a few months, then I upgraded servers and didn’t bother transferring over my media collection bc I was broke back then and needed to reuse the drives, and didn’t have enough extra space to back the media content up to anywhere. I figured that since I had something like 7Gbps symmetrical (technically shared with an apartment building but I had my own queue) I’d just redownload my terabytes of shit ezpz.
Welp, it was ezpz, all except getting banned by twitter because I was posting at some insane rate, as every download of individual episodes of random tv shows from the 90s completed.
I never much got the appeal of twitter. But I had a personal account and one for my business. Hardly used either, most recently to share images from my switch. I deleted both accounts when musky bought it.
Thanks for reminding me about my Switch account. I had deactivated my primary account years ago but forgot about that one. It felt good to be able to deactivate another account! I noticed they didn’t have the usual feedback options asking why you are leaving. Probably tired of all the feedback being some form of “Fuck Musk”.