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.