It's official. I was grateful for Elon Musk providing StarLink services to Ukraine, but it also sparked some concerns about the dangers of a single person controlling an information infrastructure. Then a month goes by, and whew boy. This. I fully expect Trump to be back on Twitter within a few days. The entirety of the right will descend on schoolboard and library trustee meetings to yell about imaginary federal issues and pick fights with whoever's hair was allegedly blue most recently. The Trump admin ditches the census in favor of mandatory Twitter accounts linked to your social security number, and you accrue charges each day that you do not check your alerts. There is no "unfollow" button for @realDonaldTrump, with each account automatically following him. Libs ditch Twitter for TikTok, where the quality of political discourse erodes even further into a soup of memes, deceptively-edited clips of octogenarian politicians, and post-ironic, 2nd amendment-adjacent softcore pornography. The American right eventually gives chase, but not before the left becomes totally illiterate, though admittedly excellent at video editing. Now, Trumpism is for intellectuals, but the movement loses out to left-wing memery, and Hunter Biden beats Trump Jr. in the Specialest Boy 2027 Very Special Presidential Election (Do It For Dad). Anyway, I'm sure whatever actually happens will somehow be way worse than any of that.if elon buys twitter and the woke crowd quits what will the VC complain about?
wrong answers only #implied
Come now. You of all people should know and understand that the makeup and legitimacy of a social network is entirely the result of its users. Twitter persists as the home of political reporting because it has rules that are suited to its users. If those rules change, the ecosystem changes - it happened to Digg, it happened to Reddit, it happened to Facebook. Should Elon Musk take Twitter over and change the ecosystem to more poorly serve the clientele that supports it, the clientele will leave and he'll have paid $43b for Gab.
So what if he does? Are Trump's declining rally numbers due to Twitter? Is 140 uncensored characters truly the dividing line between democracy and fascism in your mind? The public's distrust of the media began with the Iraq War. Once the Bush administration had burned it all up to push their agenda, they couldn't use it to push their agenda anymore. Social media? Social media they could push all day long, until they burned it up. Do you really see the social media landscape of 2022 to be at all analogous to the social media landscape of 2016?
280 characters, and yes, I do think that it is the dividing line. Ironically, I am not against Elon buying Twitter, or him reinstating Trump's account. The AG should charge Trump, and he shouldn't be a candidate. Twitter shouldn't have this influence, but media has become coopted by the political parties and we are fucked.
Agreed. However, I don't really care about Elon's "market manipulation" tweets. The SEC doesn't protect investors, they protect an industry. I don't think that's why he bought Twitter, anyway. He's going to lose that "free speech absolutist" badge, though. I don't think he understands what is coming.
That's very different from "truth." That's "clout" or "influence" or "charisma" or "credibility." "Truth", even defined by those who don't particularly value it, has a measure of objectivity. It is a thing that is the same regardless of who says it or how it is said. "All Muslims are terrorists" is "true" for many conservatives, despite the statistical, objective falseness of the statement. However, "all Muslims are terrorists" is a statement evaluated the same regardless of whether it's a tweet, a soundbite or a t-shirt. The way to alter the "truth" of "all Muslims are terrorists" is for demonstrably non-terrorist Muslims to occupy a position of affinity among conservatives. With Trump, "what he says" and "how he says it" does not matter in the slightest, it's the source that matters. Likewise, statements from Trump are not transitive from one conservative to another - neither Madison Cawthorn nor Matt Goetz, as we have learned, can "grab 'em by the pussy." Finally, Trump's "truths" are also subject to the geopolitical environment in which he operates. Trump has been booed at his own rallies for claiming credit for COVID vaccinations, and has backpedaled furiously from his Putin associations. What was "true" two years ago is no longer "true." If your definition of "truth" is "Trump says it" then "Trump's truth" is such a keenly variable concept that its relation to Twitter is so ephemerally variable as to render predictions worthless. I get your point - Trump is not bound to the truth in telling his "truths." But you haven't elucidated a reasonable argument as to how that has anything whatsoever to do with Twitter. I'll go one better - Kamil Galeev had an interesting thread about Belarus and Lukashenko a couple days ago. Galeev makes the point that Lukashenko has always been the stronger player between Lukashenko and Putin, and that Lukashenko has inoculated himself against intrigue by playing the idiot bumpkin (much as Boris Johnson does). He goes further by pointing out that Lukashenko routinely sabotages Putin by taking the official Kremlin party line to an absurd extreme, thereby depriving it of credibility. On that note? Total control by an edgelord billionaire could very well be the thing that breaks the public of any sense that social media has any credibility or impartiality, rather than its (unearned) position of esteem among people who should really know better. Jeff Katzenberg made certain that Trump couldn't fart without it being on CNN; the end result has not been great for CNN. Thus we come full circle:
The most important thing Twitter affords Trump is volume in his messaging. Putting out his "from the desk of president dipshit" statements, it's like a whole thing. He has to go through a secretary, and it looks kinda pathetic on the page if you've got one paragraph of 280 characters. Neither the Trumpian messaging complexity nor the Trumpian attention span requires more than 280 characters. I mean this fucker really must've studied Goebbels. Trump repeats his lies so often that we now know for absolutely certain that repetition is key to effective propaganda. With Twitter, he gets to repeat his lies in the format and platform he grew to basically define (see: "Twitler") so much more often than in interviews, at fund raisers, or "from the desk..." statements. Twitter will also help Trump coordinate more uhhhhhhhhh "events" in real-time with his base of supporters, should he feel the urge. (and he WILL feel the urge) I'd love for pretty much all of silicon valley to spectacularly implode, but I'm not sure how we get back to healthy discourse now that we've been kinda spoiled with low-effort internet bullshit. I don't even know what the world was like before. Also the entire notion that algorithms selecting primarily for rage-based engagement are biased against right-wing content is just fucking laughable. I'm sure that it's overwhelmingly human moderation removing far-right content that companies either don't to be associated with or held legally responsible for. Speaking of! It's gotta be way easier to bring a lawsuit against a singular owner than an entire board of shareholders, so that might get interesting. Welp, I'm off to post Nazi shit whilst tagging Elon every few minutes. I'll let you know when he abolishes the moderation team. I agree with everyone else, this will go 100% A-OK :D!
LOL that's not an argument that's six paragraphs of inchoate fear. No one - NO ONE - said "oh Trump became president due to Twitter." We got a bunch of conspiracy theories, we got a bunch of finger-pointing at social media, we got incontrovertible evidence of Russian interference, but not a single person - not a one - said 'oh, it's Twitter all the way, baby.' You can't step in the same river twice. Social media is, soup to nuts, gamified conversation. That's it, that's the whole enchilada. Talk plus points with rules. People play it because we like games. We may not think of it as a game but "game theory" isn't about checkers, it's about competition, collaboration and cooperation. You say something witty on Twitter, other people award you points in four ways (like, retweet, retweet and comment, reply). Now? now five, because apparently Twitter thinks they need downvotes? After all, everywhere else with a downvote has fostered the shit out of conversation. Either way, the rules of Twitter, as shown to the players, are simpler than the rules of Go Fish. We all know those aren't the actual rules, though, because there's moderation and banning and algorithmic chicanery and other bullshit that everyone gripes about because everyone always gripes about the ref. That's okay, though, because everyone always gripes about the ref. It's not like the ref gets to score points. OH WAIT. Look - Aaron Rogers is rich, right? Maybe he buys Lambeau Field, sells tickets at a 50% discount if you bring in a sign that says "Fuck the Buckaneers." Is that going to affect Tom Brady when he plays there? Probably not a lot because Brady is a professional and no matter what, Aaron Rogers can't throw on a striped shirt. Trump played Twitter, and he played it really well. As with most egocentric psychopaths, the game became his life. When he wasn't president? No reason to kick him off, he was great for engagement. When he was president? Well now he's president. Can't kick him off. Until he tried to burn the Reichstag, at which point even Silicon Valley has to pay lip service to fairness. Do you really think Elon Musk is at all interested in paying lip service to fairness? Do you really think Donald Trump is at all interested in operating on Twitter WITH ELON MUSK'S PERMISSION? 'cuz that's what we're talking about here - Trump tweeting at the courtesy of the king. If Trump uses Elon Musk's service, he's using Elon Musk's service. He is kissing the fucking ring. Now will he? Sure, maybe. Do you think Elon Musk hasn't thought about this? I honestly don't know, dude seems to go off half-cocked on the reg. I'd love to YOLO around 43 billion at a time, I'd make different choices that's for sure. Either way, if Trump wants to play in that park, he's handing Elon Musk his leash. And if neither of them know it now, they'll know it the first time anything vaguely controversial happens. See, there are actual things to worry about here, actual events, actual concrete actions that will lead to other concrete actions and such. There's a lot of grist for the mill between "Musk buys Twitter" and "Trump wins 2024" that all you studiously chin-stroking intellectuals are just leapfrogging the fuck over because it feels better to panic.
If Trump even decides to create a new Twitter account, he will be admitting the failure of his new Twitter startup copycat... of which I cannot even be fuckin bothered to remember the name of. But it has failed, and Trump is at the helm. Is he then going to go to Musk's Twitter?!? Well... yes. Yes, he will. Because it is easier to shit on someone else's property than to cultivate your own land. Nevermind. "'cuz that's what we're talking about here - Trump tweeting at the courtesy of the king. If Trump uses Elon Musk's service, he's using Elon Musk's service. He is kissing the fucking ring. Now will he?
Who knows? No one. Does it matter? No. Everyone freaked balls when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post without recognizing that the power move is to own it and leave it the fuck alone so that when they criticize you, you can be hipster about it. Buy Twitter only to be censored by Twitter? I mean it basically moves you from "opponent" to "DM playing an NPC" in any online feud he gets into; Moot and kn0thing did the exact same shit. 18 comments in and I ain't seen nuthin' what justifies "trump on twitter nau = trump on twitter then." Motivations, skullduggery, political affiliation, I don't care what you throw at it, there's a lot of alarmism here and not a lot of reason.
Uhhhh I mean I don't really have a formal "argument", but I do really enjoy thinking about the power dynamic, good point. Yes, Trump-Musk are currently riffing on the themes of a traditional American billionaire Possible Merger dance, of sorts. In this advertisement, yes, it's about the headline, mostly, as seen in the link URL, but one other thing we just so happen to NEVER see anywhere is that the rollout of TRUTH has been close to the shitshow we all expected it would be (but it seems to work relatively well now, see wall of text below). Sucks that I think Musk is right, that twitter is currently the main medium for political idea exchange and campaigns here in the US. He has also claimed he’ll make the algo open source, btw. click to doubt. This is NOT a defense of Twitter, btw. I hope Musk drives it into the ground, and I think there's better than 50-50 odds that he does exactly that. My prediction: Eventually, Musk "begs" Donald Trump to reclaim his twitter, according to Donald Trump's repeated re-tellings. They need each other. TRUTH might've blown it (even if only in Trump's perception), and Trump-boosted twitter traffic is a sweet, sweet thing for Mr. Musk. But I was already wrong about one thing, Trump likely won't be back on the platform anytime soon, it'll take months to finalize the deal. Whatever happens, fundamentally, retail investment in TRUTH, and moreso, outright buying Twitter wholesale is weird, if not fucked up. They are now competing brands of ingrained information networks (or not, lol TRUTH) that can be (and for TRUTH, the very intent is to be) doing a big faschy on the Front Lawn, folks. You're right though, I am scared that Trump finds his way back into the white house in Jan. 2025. I have long tried to acknowledge my fears in the hopes of correcting for the bias. Hard to tell how successfully. But hey, I'm 100% sure it's not been 100% successful. --- So You Don't Have To by am_Unition I search 'truth ' in apple's app store. Why can't I just download 'truth or dare', the second ranked result, and take a win for the day? Wow, TRUTH Social's currently ranked #3 among social media app downloads. Very quick download time, maybe 4 seconds. Used to have my old iPhone rooted and I could pull up a terminal and scope filesizes and directories. RIP. Creating TRUTH Social profile. Entering in my actual DOB, default was 18 years ago before today (hey maybe there are a lot of 18 year-olds on TRUTH, that could be cool, right?). I use one of my old throw away emails to confirm an email, and... small lol, the minimum password security is 8+ characters w/ at least one capital and one lowercase. My password will be "TRUMPSanUS", and that is the first test that I'd like to administer. OK, now I'm having doubts. It wants my phone number. No, I will see if their website is up yet. No. Nope, it is still only available through Apple's app store, not on Android, or in a browser. Hmmmm. I think I'm gonna regret this. Six digit confirmation code texted from a 1-800 number. OK, picking a username, this will take me a while. I shan't tell you it, and it shouldn't matter anyway, since I don't plan to ever interact past curating a feed and lurking, if that. It's a good username. Southern. Not offensive. I use it for my display name too. Small bio. I skipped choosing a picture. AH!, there it is! #1 Suggested Profile on the splash page: Donald J. Trump (followed) 2. Official TRUTH Social page 3. Fox News 4. Newsmax 5. Don. Jr. (followed) 6. Babylon Bee 7. Breitbart, then Dan Bongino (followed), then "Defiant L's" (apparently an account that selectively catalogs liberal twitter hypocrisy. hmm, could be problematic on TRUTH), and it's whatever else, you get it. Shoutout to Travis Tritt at about #30, though (no follow). Oh wow, you have to select at least two profiles to follow to get off the splash page. Feed generated. First post - Bongino celebrates 1 million followers. Next 10 posts - Bongino doing the election fraud thing, wow, he's active here, then a Hannity post! He linked the same fox news article I did above. It'll take me more time to really get the experience and understand the "community", but if I were Trump, I'd just greenlight them to use lib-bots for keeping the users engaged. That'll be one thing to look for. Update: so far the left has got at least a couple of seemingly-genuine whiteknight infantrymen down in the replies sections, doing about a D+ job at best of anything whatsoever. Hey, this could be a pretty good Twitter clone after all. btw I'll still get texts from Parler every month-ish, which is always delightful. Lately, selling Trump-related NFTs. Naturally.
finished this yesterday So let's talk about this from a systems standpoint. What, exactly, is the rabid right? What are their touchstones? What do they rally around? What is their common language? Around what have they assembled their nationalism? I would argue that they had assembled their nationalism around some inchoate form of modern culture does not represent us, Trump does. As long as Trump was in office, their nationalism was organized around My country is led by my President and anything my president disagrees with, I disagree with. But now? Now they're arrayed around modern culture stole my President's destiny. Or, if you prefer, modern culture stole MY destiny. And the thing I think you keep missing is that yeah, Trump can try that shit again, but then he's basically arguing "well, the process was completely rigged before but this time will be different" and asking all his followers to accept said-same. All the "election reform" and "election monitoring" and nonsense Team Trump has been ramming through is reactionary, not pro-active. Yeah it'll help Republicans win in the future, no doubt, but if Trump plays into it, he'll be acknowledging the system as legitimate and playing it eight years older, without Russian backing, as a known quantity whose previous record can be used against him. He ceases to be a maverick who can say whatever the fuck he wants, who can appeal to Julian Assange to leak John Podesta's emails and experience no blowback. You're talking about a will-be-78-year-old man that the "deep state" now knows everything about, seriously mounting a challenge in order to get a job he didn't really want in the first place? And, most importantly, what the fuck does any of that have to do with Twitter? The "imagined community" of the Right right now is entirely grievance-based. They don't even have a wall to build, they just wanna snark and burn books, man. Does where they burn books really matter? No one here has even attempted a cogent argument about this. What we've learned is that they have no tolerance for dissent or criticism and that given their 'druthers, they'll retreat to silos where they can howl at each other. Either they turn Twitter into a howling silo, in which case everyone else goes somewhere else, or they don't. Either way, "was once not a howling silo" won't have any more credibility a year from now than it does now.
The hubski feed's activity banner at the top doesn't capture drafts, so I have been using that to slip under the radar by delaying Trump-garbage postings. I agree with your italicized summary of where the movement's anger is directed, but I think this is yet another "no ideological consistency required" situation. The MAGA base might turn out in droves because of the big lie, but if someone prosecutes Trump or something else unforseen goes down, he'd run on being prosecuted (etc., reactionary), and it might work ("vote to keep me out of jail, we warned you they'd try doing this to us, folks. Faked evidence from fake people.") We might get Big Lie 2, but we can absolutely trot out the original classic for a good time and the palace coup. Anyway. Twitter. Somehow Musk buying twitter is, in and of itself, literally owning the libs, and the libs are barking mad about it. Every fox primetime pundit has said this, but I don't think it's as true as they'd like, in a general sense, but true enough for Tucker to roll tape of a twitter employee crying in reaction to the deal (P.S. the NYTimes piece that just dropped on Tucker is like "yeah, we know, we know", but it was kinda nice to see it all laid out. Best bit is confirming that Fox knowingly and intentionally uses white supremacist appeals). Fox & co. are beside themselves with delight that Musk could do away with moderation. Which is like signaling "I can hardly wait to get back to doing some of the worst possible things on the internet!". So yes, you're likely right. I expect a slow exodus, it will still probably remain a relevant platform for a while, and probably long enough that if Trump gets the mic back, that's considerably worse than if he's still relegated to struggling right-wing message boards. That's far and away my biggest concern, but a migration could also shake up journalism and reporting for a while, which have already taken a beating recently. Having to collectively decide on a new "town square" is at least a little annoying, and I wonder if it's possible that right now, Twitter sets the record for the largest shared virtual commonspace (defined numerically w/ daily users and interaction metrics and content output or something), and Twitter and everything else only splinters from here. At least for a while. We are now fairly well into to the 'social media' phase of political polarization. Maybe on a better timeline, we could talk about nationalizing a virtual commonspace, because I agree with you (from in another thread far, far away) that it's looking more and more difficult to turn a profit and have sufficient content moderation for popular platforms. Hmm, I wonder if a capitalist with $46 bln invested will tend towards profit or moderation. Actually, it's going to be entertaining to see what Musk will do if Twitter takes a dive due to advertisers and user base peace'ing out over rampant dis-, mis-, racist, sexist, violence, harassments, whatever. Speaking of book bans and burns, have you heard about the censored content library in minecraft? Someone should build a U.S. wing and put all the books banned by schools recently in there.
maybe if I say it as a haiku? What if it were a Gannt Chart? Perhaps a candygram? Okay, Trump runs on "keep me out of jail." Great. You think that's gonna energize his base? Remember - Clinton/Trump had the lowest turnout in history, Biden/Trump had the highest turnout in history. Does "keep me out of jail" draw out the MAGAts the way "build that wall" does? Does the Red Hat crowd wanna fight Culture War II with no bullets in the clip? Do you think it's an accident that they've gone local? That you have to stoke your chin to decide who has the bigger beef, McCarthy/Cawthorn or Boebert/MTG? And again - WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH TWITTER? The Libs are barking mad because their entire moral framework is "is it fair". They're insisting that the Right can't be mad about corporate speech because the Right always insists on the right of corporate speech without recognizing that only the Left cares about "is it fair." The Right cares about "do we win." This is why the Left has always had more traction with "the Right is immoral" than "the Right is unfair" because The Right cares more about their morality than they do about whether or not they parlay with the Left on equal terms because the Left so clearly doesn't deserve it. The stupid thing, that nobody is paying any fucking attention to, including you, is that social networks function the way they do because they're designed around three or four orders of magnitude fewer moderators than they need because their profitability is fuckall. Push an agenda? The agenda of every social network is "what can we get away with without having to staff up" and any notion that the slant can be changed without poisoning the content is beyond naive at this point, it reflects a willful lack of attention to well-documented prior performance. Never aspire to malice that which is more easily explained by incompetence is social networking to a T - Facebook sucks at their job, and a whole bunch of right-wing lobbyists are in the house to make sure right-wing stuff is even less filtered than left-wing stuff but it's all terrible. Facebook had a thousand moderators for a billion users. Twitter has about two thousand moderators for a third of a billion users. Musk wants them to do less work. The result is exquisitely predictable. none of this has anything to do with the NYT profiling Tucker Carlson, banned libraries in Minecraft, or the straw man you've built in your head that is everything bad about people you don't like. The only reason I'm still even entertaining this conversation is otherwise-smart people can't let go of their FearBear because he keeps whispering "Only Jack Dorsey can save us from the 4th Reich" despite all evidence to the contrary.
Yeah I definitely devoted my second to last paragraph above to almost exactly this. You brought up book banning/burning and related it to twitter quite well. I just thought it was cool that kids can access banned shit on a minecraft server. I don't think Dorsey can save us. I think he already "helped" sculpt our current infosphere, and I think he did a shit job. You're clearly angry with me. I dunno why, except for my admitting to being scared? So I'mma go.The stupid thing, that nobody is paying any fucking attention to, including you, is that social networks function the way they do because they're designed around three or four orders of magnitude fewer moderators than they need because their profitability is fuckall.
