noa ks
I get it, the community is there and the memes are there, but like come on. It’s one thing continuing to use a platform after it’s bought by another billionaire who made fun of the doctors and health officials who were concerned about the spread of covid-19, spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the importance of getting a vaccination, and who willingly reopened one of his factories during said pandemic, who was sexist, ageist, and transphobic towards both individuals and whole communities on and off twitter, and helmed a company that did nothing to stop the repeated racist abuse towards its black contracted employees, the same company described by female employees as being home to rampant sexual abuse and compared to a nightmarish frat house, who used his leverage over his workers’ stock options to blackmail them into not unionising, who accused a man who helped to rescue a trapped football team of being a paedophile and then paid a private investigator fifty-thousand dollars to try and prove it, and who used his online following to engage in securities fraud, that kind of thing happens all the time, right? Billionaires are all dickheads and spend their time buying different companies, it shouldn’t make a difference to us.
And it’s one thing if that billionaire then starts his reign as ceo by firing eighty percent of the staff, and continues his reign by reinstating the accounts of thousands of people who had been blocked for using the platform to incite violence and spread hateful propaganda, proudly removes content moderation policies forbidding misinformation about the coronavirus, protests, and other critical and sensitive topics and who, despite claiming to be all-in on free speech, has no qualms with banning anyone who calls him out or otherwise says anything remotely negative about him, even or especially if they are backed up with facts, who made the authentication checkmark a subscription which led to a resurgence in fake pornographic accounts of public figures, as well as a historic mark of approval next to countless accounts spreading hate speech, because it didn’t touch our little corner of twitter right? We don’t know anyone getting hurt or abused by these rules, right? Just keep the memes coming and keep your head low.
And it’s one thing if, over the next couple of years, we see huge amounts of misinformation on this platform, often led by the ceo himself, such as relating to the 2024 riots in the uk, russia’s invasion of ukraine, and the war in gaza, and the platform must be fined because it didn’t cooperate with australian investigations into anti-child-abuse practices, and the amount of hate speech is reported as increasing according to multiple organisations, in particular homophobia, transphobia, and anti-semitism, almost none of which is being addressed by the company or the ceo, and that includes the amount of child pornography that many organisations have expressed concern about but that never seems to be dealt with; in fact since musk took over twitter, the australian government reported that the amount of child abuse material that is proactively detected has dropped.
And now twitter has stuck an ai image generation bot into the platform, which it is said is being used to generate over six thousand sexualised images every hour. The bot has no qualms with taking the clothes off of anyone it is asked to, and that includes children. In other words, the richest man in the world has put a child porn bot on his social media, and it is being used heavily, and all he can say is that he is trying to fight for free speech.
I haven’t used twitter in about a decade and i’m happy with that, and i wish i could just not ever hear about it again, but unfortunately they keep doing really fucked up stuff. And yet people keep using the platform. I admit that i don’t think boycotts work any more because there are too many people and we have all been too desensitised to the ways that multinational corporations act. But while i think we can go this way and that about the relative merits and drawbacks of apple or google’s stances on environmentalism or privacy, twitter after musk is a company that seems to have objectively only caused harms. Spam is up. Hate speech is up. Misinformation is up. Child pornography is not only up, but is being actively enabled by new site features that lack guard rails.
This is just a short post to say that maybe you should stop using twitter now. I know that it helps people living abroad, or with niche hobbies, and that it still has smaller places where you don’t see some of this bad stuff, but that’s just like pretty much every oppressive regime ever: you can turn a blind eye to the absolutely rotten core if you want, or you can make that small change and start using something else. I’ve heard that bluesky is good if you think that your life actually benefits from hearing a million people loudly talk about how disappointed they are with the world. And i’ve heard that there are already thousands of little communities on bluesky, so you’ll probably get all the memes a couple of days later anyway. Or you could stop spending a quarter of your day in a parasocial relationship with any social media platform that thrives on snark and backhanded meta-commentary.
But please, stop using twitter.