I pulled over my car and deleted my Twitter account the moment Elon Musk purchased it.
If ten million people simply took this basic step, they would be expressing their collective power.
***
On Facebook, I posted a picture of Marine Le Pen shaking hands with Putin. The caption read, “It would be a shame if this picture of Le Pen kept getting circulated.”
Incredibly, it was taken down by Facebook as violative of their community standards.
What did I do?
I reposted the following pictures on my Facebook page.
Never accept fascism.
Madeleine Albright never did.
Nor can we.
Never.
Please share widely!
I have a facebook account only because so many other apps use it for authentication. I have never had nor used a twitter account.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on are evil.
I think you get out what you put in. I use FB for institutional information. I have a Linkedin account, but am not very active. I’ve never seen the need for Twitter. I would say TikTok is the real Devil’s work. It just seems to always get people in trouble.
Elon Musk is bad now? He’s probably done more for climate change than anyone in government by making electric cars people actually want to buy and operate. The older carmakers are finally catching up to him and we might actually break our addiction to oil.
I’ll also add there’d be no manned space program without his other company which now is taking our astronauts to the space station, the Moon, and beyond. He’s also given away satellites to the Ukrainians that have kept their internet going during this godforsaken war.
I get that he’s a mixed bag. He’s a union buster, seems like he has a history of ignoring his wives, and this Twitter BS seems like a misguided vanity project, but I don’t get the knee jerk liberal recoil to this move. If anything maybe its a good thing since if more liberals got off Twitter, we’d win more elections.
I think the thread-starter is about social media “making us stupid” (to quote an excellent piece I’ll cite below) rather than Elon Musk.
I most strongly encourage you to watch this recent piece from “Amanpour Reports”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKRuvKtFvqo reporting on the work of Jonathan Haidt. Christiane Amanpour is no lightweight and she understands free speech from a professional perspective as a journalist.
This piece argues that the current form of social media is doing grave harm to society — harm that is readily addressed by some straightforward and readily implemented regulatory changes.
The money quote:
Another important insight:
Mr. Haidt presents compelling data that social media are directly responsible for skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide among adolescent social media users — beginning in 2012. Not a gradual increase, but a hockey stick beginning in 2012. These rates have doubled since then.
There’s never been a hockey stick like this. The effect is instantaneous — the rates go up within a year of the children starting to use social media. Even the children themselves report this.
He points that whenever anybody posts anything that offends or even questions the dogma of either extreme, the reactions is immediate and intense — harsh attacks on these moderating voices.
The effect is to silence moderates and amplify the extremists.
He makes one strikingly straightforward recommendation:
His prescription:
I think we MUST make reforms like this. It MUST come from government.
I have the distinct impression that this is exactly the kind of regulation that Mr. Musk seeks to block.
That’s why I think Mr. Musk — or anyone else — must not be allowed to continue to use social media to destroy the fabric of our society.