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Ami Angelwings @ami_angelwings@urusai.social
2y
cw: good piece about Twitter & why ppl need to leave i know most people here have already left Twitter and that's why they're here, but this is still a really good piece about why anybody who hasn't should try to leave Twitter & try to get their friends to go with them, in case it might help convince somebody you know...

(and on a more meta level, if we won't even stop giving our free labour to a Nazi website to take away its power and reach, b/c it'll damage our social relations, connections, or income, what chance is there that we'll ever do anything irl when the same things are at stake? :\ )

https://ketanjoshi.co/2024/04/19/you-are-the-fuel-that-energises-elon-musks-hate-machine/
screenshot of article that reads: "There’s a parable doing the rounds. The story goes: a bartender is telling a guy about how if you let one Neo-Nazi into the bar you run, they’ll bring their friend next time. Those Nazis will bring their friends. Pretty soon you’re running a Neo-Nazi bar. So you can’t waver. “You have to shut them down” from the start. The parable has been extended to describing those who refuse to leave Elon Musk’s website: “I hang out at the Nazi bar because all my friends are there”. It’s sort of true, but with a nuance that I think makes it darker. The people hanging out at X aren’t deciding to visit the bar. Twitter turned into X brick by brick, while most inside failed to notice, or tried not to. They didn’t come to this place – the place came to them. The old bar has been destroyed, redesigned and rebuilt around its occupants. The sign has changed, the door policies have changed, and the attitude of the bouncers has changed. With clear and open intention, it has become a Nazi bar, and the only stories the bartender tells are about how immigration is a plot to replace the white race."
screenshot of article that reads: "The predictions of a rapid decline and collapse of the site have proven wrong – for what I think is a simple reason. “Bad-faith scapegoating around the [Bondi] attacker’s identity shows Australian media needs to shake its addiction to Elon Musk’s rapidly toxifying platform”, wrote Guardian Australia’s Van Badham, a few days ago. In the space of the past year, Badham has posted approximately 18,000 posts on Elon Musk’s social media site; about 60 a day and just under 2,000 in the past month. X persists because too few people want to leave it. It is not uncommon to see someone post there about a damaging change to moderation policies, a viral lie, or some hateful content, and then continue to contribute to the site. As if they were somehow not part of the sequence of events that led to the damage done. They are not stuck in traffic – they are traffic. Progressives, left-wingers and liberals continue to supply free content and free engagement to Elon Musk’s company, which then sells their eyeballs to a still substantial number of advertisers. That sustains the baseline level of cash required to keep shifting the rules of the site so that they favour Musk’s cruel, hateful and racist right-wing ideology."
screenshot of article that reads: "If you are still contributing to X, you are the energy-dense fuel that Musk is pouring into his hate machine. This is true no matter how complex your post-hoc rationalisations are. If you have a large following, and decent influence, you should stop posting on X, make your account private and begin growing your community from the ground up on whatever alternative you prefer. If you do leave, your new digs will feel empty, and it’ll take time to find your friends. You will be tempted to go back: it will take months to adjust to the lack of loud background noise. A common belief is that buying Twitter was a loss for Musk. Financially, sure: but he doesn’t care about that. Ideologically it has been a major victory. Not because Musk is good at winning, but because Twitter’s millions of hangers-on are bad at losing. I mean that literally: it is a loss, to leave. When I left Twitter in its final days, I lost contact with friends, a stream of information that is useful for my work and a vast broader network of climate and energy people. If I want any of those things back, I have to engage in a disgusting moral bargain with a disgustingly rich racist."
screenshot of article that reads: "It’s important to be clear here: there is no chance a critical mass of people will ever leave X without a major shock to the system. Musk is not a smart person but on some level he recognises that many of those who have stuck with X through every single depraved shift in its centre of gravity will happily stick with X as it gets significantly more hateful and harmful. But that doesn’t mean you should stay, and prolong its decline. I’m willing to bet that in April 2026, X is still around. But it needs to be forcibly downsized into a right-wing echo chamber like 4Chan or TruthSocial, with zero trust, prominence or reliance among media outlets, companies and government institutions in particular. If it does end up cut down to size, it’ll probably be the result of a mix of regional (probably EU) regulations, advertising revenue losses and user departures. But it’s all taking too long. If you’re still there, you can help make it faster. Take a sip and look around. Maybe tap your friends on the shoulder, too. “Hey, I think we need to leave”. You really do."
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pancakes nonbinary_cat @pancakes@meow.company
2y
re: cw: good piece about Twitter & why ppl need to leave @ami_angelwings I agree with this but I'm tired of trying to make the argument with my friends. I've already left the platform, it's not my loss. they're good people and I know them in person so it's not like I've lost them either.
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