Twitter

I have never had a Twitter account, and I won’t create one now. I’m not too excited about one oligarch controlling “free speech”. 

Jaytee said:

I have never had a Twitter account, and I won’t create one now. I’m not too excited about one oligarch controlling “free speech”. 

Incoming ...

I've been using Twitter less and less.  The right wing trolls are everywhere. It's getting so I can't even read the comments on a sports topic without seeing guys making snide comments about "wokenesss" or tossing off thinly veiled racist comments.

I doubt being bought by a megalomaniac is going to make it any better.

ml1 said:

I've been using Twitter less and less.  The right wing trolls are everywhere. It's getting so I can't even read the comments on a sports topic without seeing guys making snide comments about "wokenesss" or tossing off thinly veiled racist comments.

I doubt being bought by a megalomaniac is going to make it any better.

it’s actually gotten worse in the last 24 hours. 

The only time I use it is to get the attention of customer service groups when emails and phone calls have failed and, very occasionally to view something that someone has linked to on Facebook or similar. I just never "got" it for social interaction.

ml1 said:

I've been using Twitter less and less.  The right wing trolls are everywhere. It's getting so I can't even read the comments on a sports topic without seeing guys making snide comments about "wokenesss" or tossing off thinly veiled racist comments.

I doubt being bought by a megalomaniac is going to make it any better.

I spend too much time on twitter, but I find that most of the threads that show up on my timeline are reasonably free of rw whackjobs. I guess it just depends on who you follow.

I don't know if it will change much when and if Musk gets it. I'm not sure if he really understands what he's gotten himself into in terms of content moderation. He tweeted that he will moderate based on the law, but on a globally used app, he's going to run into a lot of law that is a lot more restrictive than U.S.'s regarding speech.

We'll see.

interesting take on why Musk might not actually follow through

China really isn't much of a point, as it's blocked in the PRC. 

dave said:

China really isn't much of a point, as it's blocked in the PRC. 

well, it's blocked now. Might Musk be eyeing a re-entry? From what I've seen he may need to look at increasing twitter revenue to make this financially worthwhile.

Elon isn't a dumb enough to think he has negotiating power with the CCP.   Is he going to prevent talk of an independent Taiwan on Twitter?  Tibet conversation groups?  Xinjiang / Uyghur rumors?  HK pro-democracy exiles having accounts?   He would have to make those concessions to even begin talks. 

dave said:

Elon isn't a dumb enough to think he has negotiating power with the CCP.   Is he going to prevent talk of an independent Taiwan on Twitter?  Tibet conversation groups?  Xinjiang / Uyghur rumors?  HK pro-democracy exiles having accounts?   He would have to make those concessions to even begin talks. 

More likely, he could use his control of the Twitter to make it more palatable to China, not to have the Twitter be used in China, but to get benefits in China for his other businesses.

Twitter sucks.

I'll admit that occasionally there is useful stuff but overall it's a cesspool.

drummerboy said:

ml1 said:

I've been using Twitter less and less.  The right wing trolls are everywhere. It's getting so I can't even read the comments on a sports topic without seeing guys making snide comments about "wokenesss" or tossing off thinly veiled racist comments.

I doubt being bought by a megalomaniac is going to make it any better.

I spend too much time on twitter, but I find that most of the threads that show up on my timeline are reasonably free of rw whackjobs. I guess it just depends on who you follow.

I don't know if it will change much when and if Musk gets it. I'm not sure if he really understands what he's gotten himself into in terms of content moderation. He tweeted that he will moderate based on the law, but on a globally used app, he's going to run into a lot of law that is a lot more restrictive than U.S.'s regarding speech.

We'll see.

I'm sure it's because of who I follow. But the rw trolls are commenting on stories about sports and entertainment, not just politics.  Here's one example -- a fun story out of the NCAA men's basketball tournament was an incident where a ball got trapped behind the backboard.  The only person who could reach it was a woman cheerleader who climbed the shoulders of her male teammate and got the ball down.  A feel-good story, right?  Not to the conservative male snowflakes who made sure to point out that the woman needed a man's shoulders to stand on, or to muse about what would happen when the "woke mob" found the woman's tweets from high school, or point out that she had nothing to be concerned about because her "chin diaper" hid her identity.

That was a bit of a turning point for me.  Kind of like -- the right wing males are so easily triggered that they ruin everything.  They're why we can't have nice things.  I'll leave the Twitter to them.

Jaytee said:

I have never had a Twitter account, and I won’t create one now. I’m not too excited about one oligarch controlling “free speech”. 

I've been on there since 2009. It's certainly changed since then. I do try to stay out of politics on there though as it's a shitshow, and I give kudos to nohero and others for going at it as much there as they do here.

As for one oligarch controlling "free speech"... The last oligarch controlling it only left 6 months ago, so what's the diff?

When this discussion is moved from "Virtual Cafe", should it go to "Politics" or "Russian And Alternative News"?

Some good points made in this essay, about the effect that the Twitter has on public discourse.  I don't think that it's the only forum in which this happens, though, since this could be said of practically any way to communicate, to some degree.

Jack Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder and former chief executive, always wanted it to be something else. Something it wasn’t, and couldn’t be. “The purpose of Twitter is to serve the public conversation,” he said in 2018. Twitter began “measuring conversational health” and trying to tweak the platform to burnish it. Sincere as the effort was, it was like those liquor ads advising moderation. You don’t get people to drink less by selling them whiskey. Similarly, if your intention was to foster healthy conversation, you’d never limit thoughts to 280 characters or add like and retweet buttons or quote-tweet features. Twitter can’t be a place to hold healthy conversation because that’s not what it’s built to do.

So what is Twitter built to do? It’s built to gamify conversation. As C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher at the University of Utah, has written, it does that “by offering immediate, vivid and quantified evaluations of one’s conversational success. Twitter offers us points for discourse; it scores our communication. And these gamelike features are responsible for much of Twitter’s psychological wallop. Twitter is addictive, in part, because it feels so good to watch those numbers go up and up.”
...

Twitter takes the rich, numerous and subtle values that we bring to communication and quantifies our success through follower counts, likes and retweets. Slowly, what Twitter rewards becomes what we do. If we don’t, then no matter — no one sees what we’re saying anyway. We become what the game wants us to be, or we lose. And that’s what’s happening to some of the most important people and industries and conversations on the planet right now.

Opinion | Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

nohero said:

When this discussion is moved from "Virtual Cafe", should it go to "Politics" or "Russian And Alternative News"?

I hope not. I was thinking this is a safe place to escape the “soviets”…

I saw the RW membership increased a lot since Musk is going to control it. 

dave said:

Elon isn't a dumb enough to think he has negotiating power with the CCP.   Is he going to prevent talk of an independent Taiwan on Twitter?  Tibet conversation groups?  Xinjiang / Uyghur rumors?  HK pro-democracy exiles having accounts?   He would have to make those concessions to even begin talks. 

And he has a Tesla plant there, and hopes for growth, that could be significantly impacted when the authorities become dissatisfied with the content of Twitter

Elon's latest tweet. Kind of funny.

Smedley said:

Elon's latest tweet. Kind of funny.

if he is implying that conservatives have not moved to the right since 2008 then he is an idiot. But I frankly suspect that he’s just being an ****, which is his baseline state.

Smedley said:

Elon's latest tweet. Kind of funny.

I know.  Who in their right mind thinks the 2020 "conservative" is in the same place that the 2008 model was?

Smedley said:

Elon's latest tweet. Kind of funny.

if you mean funny because it's absurdly wrong, I agree. Or if you mean it's funny because only an idiot would think history began in 2008, I'd also agree.

OTOH, if you think it's funny because a billionaire could be stupid enough to think that cartoon is insightful, I think that it's actually sad and pathetic.

mrincredible said:

Smedley said:

Elon's latest tweet. Kind of funny.

if he is implying that conservatives have not moved to the right since 2008 then he is an idiot. But I frankly suspect that he’s just being an ****, which is his baseline state.

Yes that is the inaccurate part, as the right most certainly has gone off deep end since '08. 

I'm kinda slow today. What exactly is that tweet supposed to be saying? My son says it's an overton window thing, but I'm not seeing it.

meanwhile

drummerboy said:

I'm kinda slow today. What exactly is that tweet supposed to be saying? My son says it's an overton window thing, but I'm not seeing it.

supposedly the "overton window" has shifted left in the past dozen years.  And if someone wanted to label the left pole with "medicare for all", "wealth tax", "free college tuition", "forgiveness of student loan debt", "break up big tech", there might be a strong and intelligent case for the political dialogue in this country trending more progressive.  But that would also be an ahistorical POV, because from the progressive movement in the early 20th century through about 1970, the political "center" was to the left of where it is today.  From trust busting through the rise of unions, to the New Deal and the Great Society, tons of progressive legislation was passed that could NEVER pass today.  But of course the dude (I'm sure it was a dude) who drew it focused on the objections to casual bigotry.  Tells a lot about conservatives, that being against bigotry and misogyny is seen as solely a liberal value.  

That cartoon also showed up this week in the SOMA Talks FB group, but I didn't bother to comment.  I mostly lurk there to see what bug the local crackpots have up their **** today.  I stay out for a couple of reasons.  First is that the people who post there don't give any indication they're actually interested in thoughtful discussion.  Second is that most of the frequent commenters there seem to be kind of dumb.  So what's to be gained by getting into an exchange with stupid people who aren't interested in respectful discussion?

I see the cartoon as a mildly to moderately amusing depiction of how the left has moved left in recent years, alienating some center voters in the process. The cartoon is not fully accurate nor does it pull in context of 20th-century history. It is a friggin cartoon. Are you this fun at parties? 

Smedley said:

I see the cartoon as a mildly to moderately amusing depiction of how the left has moved left in recent years, alienating some center voters in the process. The cartoon is not fully accurate nor does it pull in context of 20th-century history. It is a friggin cartoon. Are you this fun at parties? 

Probably more fun than you if that's your idea of funny. The cartoon is really, really stupid. And pointing that out doesn't mean I don't have a sense of humor.  

If the cartoonist didn't want to move the right side further to the right, they could have at least dropped it straight down towards some flames. 

ml1 said:

Smedley said:

I see the cartoon as a mildly to moderately amusing depiction of how the left has moved left in recent years, alienating some center voters in the process. The cartoon is not fully accurate nor does it pull in context of 20th-century history. It is a friggin cartoon. Are you this fun at parties? 

Probably more fun than you if that's your idea of funny. The cartoon is really, really stupid. And pointing that out doesn't mean I don't have a sense of humor.  

So the notion that the left has moved to the left in recent years is really, really stupid? Zero basis in reality? Nate Silver has it all wrong, but you have it right?

From Silver: "What Elon is encountering on Twitter (and on MOL) is not the Democratic Party but left-leaning "thought leaders" (e.g. media, academics, experts, activists) and the leftmost of those folks have moved to the left especially in the *public* sphere (maybe privately not as much)."