My old friend, Ken, announced that he was leaving twitter yesterday. His reasoning was fair and internally consistent with his oft-repeated position on free speech.
This is exactly how it’s supposed to work, as I’ve been arguing for years. Twitter — or whoever runs it — has rights. I have rights. If one of us disagrees with the other’s exercise of rights, we can part company. That, not government regulation, is the way to do it. I’m repulsed by the flood of triumphant bigotry and trolling, and by Musk’s sad-lonely-boy leaning into the arms of freaks who embrace him in his fruitless quest for love. But I’d never ask the government to stop it. I’m voting with my feet, exactly the way I’ve been telling people to do for years.
A number of other people have similarly expressed the view that they do not choose to be part of the content twitter is selling as well. In contrast, I twitted that I have no plan to flee the platform, in protest or otherwise.
The idea of being in a silo with only agreeable people sounds awful and boring. As bad as Twitter can be at times, filled with knaves and fools, it's better than being stuck in a room filled with people who agree with me.
I would much rather be offended than bored to death.
— Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) December 12, 2022
When twitter first became a thing, I chose not to participate. That changed not because I suddenly realized that 140 characters was sufficient to express serious thoughts, but because it was where the fun was. It wasn’t about twitter, per se, but about the people on twitter engaging with the other people on twitter.
Now that Elon Musk has taken over, restoring the accounts of some very nasty people, revealing the games played by prior management, and twitting some seriously bizarre stuff that one would not expect to come from an adult of modest sentience, does that change the calculus? Musk had nothing to do with either my thoughts or twits before, and I fail to see why he would matter to me now. He bought twitter? So what? Does one buy a Tesla because one adores Musk or because one chooses to drive a Tesla?
There was a time when the scent of musk was popular as a perfume. I never cared for it and found the odor off-putting. So I chose not to use it, but I didn’t care if anyone else liked it and chose to emit the smell of musk. I still don’t.
There have been calls for people to move their twitting to new platforms, such as Mastodon. I signed up to nab my name just in case, but before you do, you have to acknowledge its rules.
How those rules can or will be applied is a mystery, but whoever gets to make the calls as to what’s acceptable is unlikely to see things the way I do. They may be allowed to decide what constitutes harassment to them, and, not being a mod, I have no say in the matter. This isn’t my gig. There’s another site called “Post,” but there’s a waiting list to join. I’m not really a stand-in-line for something I don’t desperately want kinda guy.
Much as I might find it unpleasant and a bad use of my time and attention to hang around in a place where nasty people spew dumb right wing nonsense, I would similarly find it undesirable to be in an echo chamber of wokeiosity, scolds informing me to be better, by which they mean do as I’m told, mediocre white man that I am. I don’t want to and I don’t have to. If that means a million smug little boys and girls don’t like me, I can live with that.
Is this the end of twitter? Will the public square, albeit unofficial, shut its doors? Should I join my pal Ken and vote with my feet? Has the notion of social media, that place where we can all engage for better or worse in our new digital metaverse, burned itself out like so many of its virtual predecessors that seemed to control the future until, one day, then imploded and disappeared?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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Lets just see how #6 goes when the next pandemic comes around and people disagree with our pharma industry & their front men.
I’m sure it will turn out to be no different, the guy who owns it decides what is acceptable, and as you say, if you don’t like it, leave.
Of course with the ‘acceptable’ limits for what is acceptable being set by Govt & their propaganda, no-one will be on the wrong side of many social ideas if they want to be allowed ‘free’ speech. The decision between letting people say what they want and what Govt regulators say what is OK is a very simple one if social media companies want to exist. You will be censored, Twitter or Mastodon, like it or not.
I joined a Mastodon server shortly after Musk’s Twitter acquisition, in case the doomsayers turned out to be correct. I checked in daily for about 10 days, and then decided not to continue doing so until today in order to make sure the following description is correct. I found only one of my valued Twitter follows to follow on Mastodon, so almost all that I saw were posts by random, to me, strangers.
On Mastodon: it has no owner; it’s a decentralized network of individual servers (web sites) that use common open-source software and a common inter-server communication protocol. A member can show only posts on the local server, or also posts on all servers to which it’s connected. Each server can determine its own policies. Currently there are about 3,300 servers. Some are general-purpose, and some say they cater to a special interest but these are generally open to anyone. Some can be joined at will; others have an application process.
The rules that Scott posted are those of the mastodon.social server, an early, general purpose one that has a large membership. The one I joined, mastodon.sdf.org, has these rules:
1. This server abides by the Mastodon Covenant
2. Organizations are welcome to engage with the community in a non-commercial, non-advertising manner.
3. Artists, musicians, writers and artisans are welcome to engage with the community regarding their craft. [but it’s open to anyone –SB]
The Mastodon Covenant is the rules of joinmastodon.org, a server that lists other servers, with brief descriptions, for those who are looking for one. There is no requirement for a server to be listed by joinmastodon and thus to abide by its Covenant, which consists of three operational rules (daily backups, at least two persons with emergency access, 3 months advance shut-down notice) plus “Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.”
I say stay. Without Twitter, I might be tempted to say the stupid shit here on SJ, wasting your bandwidth, testing your patience, and filling your electronic wastebasket. And, where else can I tell you about electric cars with make-believe stick shifts and vroom-vroom sounds?
Hey look, Musk is playing with his new toy. End of story. Sooner or later, he either loses interest or dumps his costly investment. Even at a loss, what does he care? It’s a tax right-off!
Whether we stay or leave, it’s a toss-up, like Ken and Scott say. A “personal decision.” The thought occurs to us: How many Twitter users are tradespeople? People who climb ladders, work with their hands eight hours a day, etc., trying to support themselves and their families, don’t have so much time to dabble in virtual unreality.
It’s nice to be able to post your personal codswaddle without pre-moderation. See my unmoderated thoughts under Scott’s tweets, copied and pasted above.
All of those isms and phobias are going to be difficult to avoid since I’m not even sure what some of them are. Does the prohibition of casteism mean no more kshatriya jokes? Seems only fair if you’re going to invent a form of hate speech that you’re required to define it.
So the Pope of Free Speech is leaving Twitter in protest of the new owner’s stand in favor of free speech? Some damn good irony there, but it demonstrates the reach and power of Trump. Over five short years White’s (well founded) disgust toward Trump has transformed him from entertaining and informative free speech advocate to progressive internet troll to protester against free speech. Trump is an evil wizard of Jedi mind control.
The change at Twitter is not as earth-shattering as people think. The left thinks that it changed from a safe space to a hate-speech-enabling fascist dictatorship. The right thinks that it changed from a censoring hellhole to a bastion of free speech. The left, although completely wrong as usual, is closer to the truth than the right in this case.
The reality is that Twitter changed from one kind of dictatorship to another. Pre-musk, the dictator was a relatively new type of governance structure, a “woke swarm” in which vague rules are enforced by faceless decision-makers, so that anything that offends anyone in the group will be censored, while anything that matches the ideology of the swarm will not be censored even if it clearly violates the rules. Rules would be changed as necessary to reflect the ideology of the group, as set by the most passionate and most “marginalized.”
Post-musk, the dictator is Elon Musk. If he likes you, you can speak. If he doesn’t like you, you can’t (Alex Jones, Robert Malone, etc.). He unbanned a few token right-wingers to create the illusion of free speech (or hate speech, depending on your ideology). This does seem like an improvement, but it is a marginal one. He is selling slightly more enlightened censorship in a package labelled “free speech.”
Those who storm out in a tantrum will have two choices. Sheepishly creep back in and delete the “leaving” tweets (or make a lame excuse), or wistfully watch everyone else having fun.
RWMaloneMD is back as of today, as is Peter McCullough and Jay Bhattacharya. Your analysis might be a little biased.
Excellent news! The musk flavor of censorship is even more enlightened than I had previously thought. I’ll be first in line to buy my souvenir bottle of Musk Scentsor in a ship-shaped bottle.
Sounds to me like a bunch of folks are envious of his shiny, expensive new toy.
Leaving twitter because of the presence of misinformation, bigotry, trolls, and sad pandering for acceptance is like leaving the US for Canada because Biden is a buffoonish demagogue who panders to an authoritarian mob. True, but obviously not the operating principle.
Everyone leaving Twitter because they don’t like the new management and trumpeting their arrival on Mastodon has either overlooked or forgotten about the ban of Wil Wheaton, one of the most terminally woke celebrities in Hollywood, because one of Mastodon’s “content moderators” found Wheaton on a list of allegedly TERF-leaning accounts.
For better or worse, Twitter’s been the one social media platform that lets my writing reach the biggest possible audience. Since Musk started retooling things I’ve noticed a bigger engagement with my account and my stuff, but YMMV.
Since I write, and I want people to read my stuff, I’ll be staying over in the Chief Twit’s space.
When Wheaton was still on Twitter, he blocked me, presumably for my unwokeness (though as far as I recall I had never interacted with him there). But nobody is pure enough for the trans activists. The slightest hint of a sign of thinking for oneself occasionally in the area of gender ideology is fatal if they decide they don’t like you (despite the ideologues themselves constantly contradicting themselves).
Look at Twitter now and then when an article I’m interested in includes a link. I’m surrounded with friends, family and customers who have real lives, real opinions and real problems. That more than keeps me busy, so I don’t really care what happens on Twitter. I guess that’s part of being one of F. Lee Billy’s tradespeople. If so it’s a good part.
If you think some rich douche-bag POS is gonna save anything, including ‘free speech’, you’re more deluded than he is…
If Popehat finds Mastodon pedantic and dull and then decides to begin blogging again instead of returning to Twitter, I will consider his departure a unintentionally good thing.
He’ll probably eventually get banned from Mastodon (or, at least, whatever server of it he’s on, and maybe the whole federated group that follows that set of rules and bans connections to the outside servers that don’t) because he doesn’t toe ideological lines very well. Somebody will accuse him of some -ism or -phobia and he’ll reply in a snarky way and be gone.
I’m a bit surprised that nobody mentioned #5, especially considering the regulars here. How do I know what’s illegal in Germany, and to what extent it applies. Can I criticize the German gov’t officials or make fun of Erdogollum? What about anything in Germany that’s illegal that I don’t know about?
I’m not going to study foreign law, just to run my mouth.
Why does Germany get special status as the country whose laws must be obeyed?
From Wikipedia:
Developer(s) Mastodon gGmbH
Since 2021 it has been registered in Germany as a not for profit (“gemeinnützige GmbH”).
So I would presume they are a German company and are constrained by the laws of that country.
Like blog.SimpleJustice.us, Ken White on Twitter was one of the best things in the history of the internet, and I am selfishly very sad to see him go. Both because of everything I learned from his lawsplainers and because I believe his steady flow of acerbic ripostes to the haters and dummies is exactly what Twitter needs right now, not that he owes that to anyone.