Excuse the gross comparison, but if a serial public pee-er moves to the same area I live in and pees wantonly all over the place, the answer isn't "just move somewhere without people peeing in public", it's to take some action and complain loudly about the fact I don't like that someone is peeing all over where I live without any repercussion.
Elon Musk has too much in the game to both participate on and run Twitter. The bans in the last weeks are far too convenient to simply be the new moderation staff finding abhorrent persons when there are reporters, parodists, and just general Elon Musk objectors being banned from Twitter without any oversight or reason. Mastodon is not a good alternative, as nice as it might be; the on-boarding and the concept is too much for most people, and ultimately moving to Mastodon is just conceding Twitter to Elon Musk, when openly defying and degrading all stores of value that Elon can influence are a real way to enact change.
Already the biggest Tesla investors are calling Elon Musk out as detrimental to Tesla stock because of his performance on/with Twitter. I do not desire punishment or pain for anyone, but I also don't want someone to be able to manipulate public discourse like I understand Elon Musk is currently doing with Twitter (for my perception, the bans are just far too specific and vague; the tweets and their content are completely non-offensive and the rulings from Twitter are far too specific to be afterthoughts of safety)
Elon Musk is not a great person by any means, he just has money; money should not be a reason to elevate an opinion above another by any stretch of the imagination. The sooner that the world accepts this, the better, and if it means that Elon Musk's valuation tanks, then so be it.
Well there you go. There was a user (jakelazaroff) minutes ago replied her claiming with an anecdote that '...many of the people I follow have talked about moving to Mastodon' as if that is any rebuttal of my comment and he ends up deleting it altogether.
This is exactly how you know that the techies here and the media are driving this false narrative using panic and fear tactics after they realised that Twitter did not fall over as claimed weeks after since it is not been admitted that this article did not age well.
In reality, Twitter has been more alive and still running with its 200M+ daily active users.
I had to listen to the praise orgy for years, I'm sure it'll be a long hate orgy as well. It's just easier to notice when the orgy isn't too your fetish.
Yes now we are finally at the point where the “free speech absolutism” stuff is dropped and we can have an honest discussion about why linking to a Facebook profile is somehow more objectionable than posting transphobic content.
It's not reasonable for someone claiming free speech absolutism & unbiased moderation. You do make a good point by pointing out Musk could have just built his own social media platform instead of crying about the moderation and blowing $44B on Twitter, only to fail to make good on his promise of free speech.
It is, and they can do what they like! I have moved to Mastodon without too much fuss and I'm enjoying it so far.
Does that mean it's a good idea, that it's not rank hypocrisy, or that it's in any way in the spirit of a "marketplace of ideas"? No.
Let's say I was a person rooting for Twitter under Musk to succeed; even viewing it through that lens, this seems really really super dumb, and I can't imagine people sticking around if they can't promote their work elsewhere.
It's his business, but that doesn't necessarily rationalize it. Jack Dorsey's Twitter, for as oblivious and misguided as it was, didn't stop people from connecting on other sites. This is a top-down decision to lock everyone in the Hellsite, and I'm pretty sure this will be the tipping point for most average users.
>I'm pretty sure this will be the tipping point for most average users
I don't think so. Musk is doing the same thing Trump did - a new outrage every day to keep the masses coming back. It's far more important to generate controversy than anything else and he can get a whole new day of Twitter views when he changes the policy again next week.
I mean I don’t think Musks critics are asking for the government to intervene here (well, other than those pointing out it might violates EU regs).
I was pretty cynical about his purchase and Im not terribly happy about being proven right. My hope is that he gets bored with it, sells it, and it gets a boring new owner that’s less ideological.
Yeah, the post you're responding to is missing that the responses to right-wing concerns about censorship were responding to "principled" free speech absolutism or a desire for government intervention.
There were left-wing critiques of twitter's moderation all of the time, but I don't recall seeing anyone on here advocating for government intervention to tweak it.
Posts like the one you're responding to are parroting the arguments without understanding what the arguments were actually against.
What's the problem with critique? I mean we know Musk does not like it in any way, shape, or form, he has made that oh so very clear. But complaining about Twitter is not officially against Twitter rules (yet).
Let's all remember the spirit of '20, everyone: Twitter is a private company, if you don't like it build your own twitter!