"allowed", such passive tone weasel word bullshit.
Built. Molded. Intentionally designed. Musk bought Twitter because he was mad about being moderated out of being a transphobic ass-backward piece of shit, and decided he'd make his own "freeze peach" with blackjack and hookers.
For those who aren't aware of the link between Kashoggi's murder, Twitter and Saudi Arabia I would recommend watching The Dissident.
And while speaking of bastard organizations, I can't help but mention the Israeli "Pegasus" who made the software used to spy and facilitate his brutal murder (you use of the term "butcher" is sadly more accurate).
Not to deflect blame from Musk, but Jack was just as bad. He openly let Trump ignore the rules and TOS of the website because it got more ad revenue into the site. Trump said the most asinine, racist, sexist, queerphobic, ablest bullshit, but who gives a shit when he's the President?! He got suspended when he made Jan 6th happen. Everything before then was cool because it never got enough bad press.
Musk made it worse, but Jack is why it was possible in the first place. Jack banned leftists saying queer rights are more important than cishet feelings. Jack banned BIPOC from commenting on white people being openly racist and using slurs, but you called them a cracker once, you get perma-banned.
There are legal complications with silencing a sitting US president. Before Elon, Twitter struggled to contextualize and mitigate the damage. After Elon, the "damage" got artificially boosted to the top of the feed.
I had to leave Twitter because of right wing Nazi harassment. It was bad before Musk, but it used to be possible to report and remove bad actors. After Musk, reports were DOA.
There are legal complications with silencing a sitting US president. Before Elon, Twitter struggled to contextualize and mitigate the damage.
It's not a 1st Amendment violation, and every president has the ability to communicate tot the public 24/7. At least when Windrow Wilson had his 3 AM racist thoughts it wasn't able to get out fast enough for the press secretary to try and bury the lead.
Correct, but at least the prior management cared about running a social media site. EM is actively making it worse than it was. I am losing no sleep thinking about it in a time when people are blaming all the social ills on X.
Its position in the cultural zeitgeist will not change until people make the move to Threads, Mastodon, and BlueSky. That is not happening overnight.
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you.
So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.”
and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues. “you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.”
And i was like, “oh damn.”
and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
A conservative right winger with the backing of a foreign government (the Saudis) purchased with the explicit purposes of controlling the narratives around US elections.
Because as we know Trump has never really been all that successful on Twitter or anything and the dreadful years of reading „Trump tweeted“ in the news every single day was just our collective imagination. And of course Elon didn‘t buy the website trying to replicate the cult following which - as we all know - was totally never a thing before. /s
Any time someone says they’re a “moderate” or a centrist, it usually means they will fold to fascism if it serves them, which makes them a right-winger by default. Fuck all of this soft language. You either support human rights, or you don’t. There is no middle ground.
If the alternative is extremism that continues to push right, centrists are doing fuck all for the working class collective. Extremism unfortunately makes that an inescapable reality.
It’s anecdotal but every time I’ve encountered a person that identified as centrist or moderate, they mostly aligned with conservative ideology and were otherwise absent from political participation or opinion. It becomes this thing where they pick and choose based on their own personal privilege because their future isn’t yet being threatened by extremism (which can also be attributed to classical liberalism). This is the unfortunate byproduct of being up against a side that is willing to take everything from people in order to get what they want.
Is it? Real democracies have like 30ish parties you can vote for and 2-4 parties of that, that'll for the government and like up to 10 parties that will form the parliament.
Why should the US be special? Is everyone in the US born with binary opinions?
What about me? I don't support Democrats or Republicans. Every time I vote, I vote for "Big Giant Astroid inbound for earth to end us all".
If not that, then maybe Spiderman. To me Superman is too goody goody, and would get decimated on the world stage when sacrifices must be made. Batman seems like he only rescues the rich, and therefore might be ecconomically problematic. But Spiderman, he's always doing the right thing, despite heavy media criticism from media outlets trying to paint him as the bad guy. He knows all about sacrifice too. He jumps off of buildings to save people. I mean, yes, there was that weird time he put on a black costume for a bit, and argueably did some evil things......but he's past that. Besides. He's not the only New Yorker who's had black goo dripping down his face.