This has been my thought for a while, since before Musk even finalized the purchase of Twitter. They mentioned wealthy foreign investors backing him near the end of the deliberations, and it immediately clued me in. The working class, or the populous at large, have been using social media to unite and protest for years. Look at Iran and the anti-hijab movement. Look at BLM and how it exploded a few years ago. The ruling class are dumbing down education across the board, and limiting what we can even read from libraries. Disrupting our ability to communicate, share and coordinate is just another step. Why is Musk shooting himself in the foot? What business decision makes sense to gut every aspect of Twitter and then prevent outside viewers from seeing tweets? He’s killing it. And Reddit’s doing the same.
What was Twitter? An extremely popular and multicultural, border breaking venue for communication? What was Reddit but a (by and large) progressive and intellectual community sharing ideas that mattered? (On top of feel good stories or something to get your rocks off to.) Then look at Threads, where they explicitly stated they’re going to avoid politics and news? Not letting those topics be part of the discourse. It’s obvious.
Places like this are shrinking and are absolutely under attack.
But seriously, why aren’t we talking about this more? We’ve seen some fairly significant mass movements gain real traction on Twitter and Reddit in the past few years and, simultaneously and nearly instantly they are both quickly scrambled and made completely useless for that purpose.
This has been my thought for a while, since before Musk even finalized the purchase of Twitter. They mentioned wealthy foreign investors backing him near the end of the deliberations, and it immediately clued me in. The working class, or the populous at large, have been using social media to unite and protest for years. Look at Iran and the anti-hijab movement. Look at BLM and how it exploded a few years ago. The ruling class are dumbing down education across the board, and limiting what we can even read from libraries. Disrupting our ability to communicate, share and coordinate is just another step. Why is Musk shooting himself in the foot? What business decision makes sense to gut every aspect of Twitter and then prevent outside viewers from seeing tweets? He’s killing it. And Reddit’s doing the same.
What was Twitter? An extremely popular and multicultural, border breaking venue for communication? What was Reddit but a (by and large) progressive and intellectual community sharing ideas that mattered? (On top of feel good stories or something to get your rocks off to.) Then look at Threads, where they explicitly stated they’re going to avoid politics and news? Not letting those topics be part of the discourse. It’s obvious.
Places like this are shrinking and are absolutely under attack.
But seriously, why aren’t we talking about this more? We’ve seen some fairly significant mass movements gain real traction on Twitter and Reddit in the past few years and, simultaneously and nearly instantly they are both quickly scrambled and made completely useless for that purpose.
Take a look at the Hong Kong protests. Twitter was a huge way to show the world what was going on. But also full of shills and bots sewing discord
Honestly at this point I can’t tell if I’m happy or sad about things like Twitter going away. It was full of horrible discourse and bots and misinformation, but also helped a lot of people. Back in the day it was insanely helpful for directing large areas affected by disasters.
I just don’t see the good uses of these platforms ever coming back from all these primadonna CEOs