After Matt Taibbi Leaves Twitter, Elon Musk ‘Shadow Bans’ All Of Taibbi’s Tweets, Including The Twitter Files
from the a-show-in-three-acts dept
The refrain to remember with Twitter under Elon Musk: it can always get dumber.
Quick(ish) recap:
On Thursday, Musk’s original hand-picked Twitter Files scribe, Matt Taibbi, went on Mehdi Hasan’s show (which Taibbi explicitly demanded from Hasan, after Hasan asked about Taibbi’s opinions on Musk blocking accounts for Modi in India). The interview did not go well for Taibbi in the same manner that finding an iceberg did not go well for the Titanic.
One segment of the absolutely brutal interview involves Hasan asking Taibbi the very question that Taibbi had said he wanted to come on the show to answer: what was his opinion of Musk blocking Twitter accounts in India, including those of journalists and activists, that were critical of the Modi government? Hasan notes that Taibbi has talked up how he believes Musk is supporting free speech, and asked Taibbi if he’d like to criticize the blocking of journalists.
Taibbi refused to do so, and claimed he doesn’t really know about the story, even though it was the very story that Hasan initially tweeted about that resulted in Taibbi saying he’d tell Hasan his opinion on the story if he was invited on the show. It was, well, embarrassing to watch Taibbi squirm as he knew he couldn’t say anything critical about Musk. He already saw how the second Twitter Files scribe, Bari Weiss, was ex-communicated from the Church of Musk for criticizing Musk’s banning of journalists.
The conversation was embarrassing in real time:
Hasan: What’s interesting about Elon Musk is that, we’ve checked, you’ve tweeted over thirty times about Musk since he announced he was going to buy Twitter last April, and not a word of criticism about him in any of those thirty plus tweets. Musk is a billionaire who’s been found to have violated labor laws multiples times, including in the past few days. He’s attacked labor unions, reportedly fired employees on a whim, slammed the idea of a wealth tax. Told his millions of followers to vote Republican last year, and in response to a right-wing coup against Bolivian leftist President Evo Morales tweeted “we’ll coup whoever we want.”
And yet, you’ve been silent on all that.
How did you go, Matt, from being the scourge of Wall St. The man who called Goldman Sachs the Vampire Squid, to be unwilling to say anything critical at all about this right wing reactionary anti-union billionaire.
Taibbi: Look….[long pause… then a sigh]. So… so… I like Elon Musk. I met him. This is part of the calculation when you do one of these stories. Are they going to give you information that’s gonna make you look stupid. Do you think their motives are sincere about doing x or y…. I did. I thought his motives were sincere about the Twitter Files. And I admired them. I thought he did a tremendous public service in opening the files up. But that doesn’t mean I have to agree with him about everything.
Hasan: I agree with you. But you never disagree with him. You’ve gone silent. Some would say that’s access journalism.
Taibbi: No! No. I haven’t done… I haven’t reported anything that limits my ability to talk about Elon Musk…
Hasan: So will you criticize him today? For banning journalists, for working with Modi government to shut down speech, for being anti-union. You can go for it. I’ll give you as much time as you’d like. Would you like to criticize Musk now?
Taibbi: No, I don’t particularly want to… uh… look, I didn’t criticize him really before… uh… and… I think that what the Twitter Files are is a step in the right direction…
Hasan: But it’s the same Twitter he’s running right now…
Taibbi: I don’t have to disagree with him… if you wanna ask… a question in bad faith…
[crosstalk]
Hasan: It’s not in bad faith, Matt!
Taibbi: It absolutely is!
Hasan: Hold on, hold on, let me finish my question. You saying that he’s good for Twitter and good for speech. I’m saying that he’s using Twitter to help one of the most rightwing governments in the world censor speech. I will criticize that. Will you?
Taibbi: I have to look at the story first. I’m not looking at it now!
By Friday, that exchange became even more embarrassing. Because, due to a separate dispute that Elon was having with Substack (more on that in a bit), he decided to arbitrarily bar anyone from retweeting, replying, or even liking any tweet that had a Substack link in it. But Taibbi’s vast income stems from having one of the largest paying Substack subscriber bases. So, in rapid succession he announced that he was leaving Twitter, and would rely on Substack, and that this would likely limit his ability to continue working on the Twitter Files. Minutes later, Elon Musk unfollowed Taibbi on Twitter.
Quite a shift in the Musk/Taibbi relationship in 24 hours.
Then came Saturday. First Musk made up some complete bullshit about both Substack and Taibbi, claiming that Taibbi was an employee of Substack, and also that Substack was violating their (rapidly changing to retcon whatever petty angry outburst Musk has) API rules.
Somewhat hilariously, the Community Notes feature — which old Twitter had created, though once Musk changed its name from “Birdwatch” to “Community Notes,” he acted as if it was his greatest invention — is correcting Musk:
Because also either late Friday or early Saturday, Musk had added substack.com to Twitter’s list of “unsafe” URLs, suggesting that it may contain malicious links that could steal information. Of course, the only one malicious here was Musk.
Also correcting Musk? Substack founder Chris Best:
Then, a little later on Saturday, people realized that searching for Matt Taibbi’s account… turned up nothing. Taibbi wrote on Substack that he believed all his Twitter Files had been “removed” as first pointed out by William LeGate:
But, if you dug into Taibbi’s Twitter account, you could still find them. Mashable’s Matt Binder solved the mystery and revealed, somewhat hilariously, that Taibbi’s acount appears to have been “max deboosted” or, in Twitter’s terms, had the highest level of visibility filters applied, meaning you can’t find Taibbi in search. Or, in the parlance of today, he shadowbanned Matt Taibbi.
Again, this shouldn’t be a surprise, even though the irony is super thick. Early Twitter Files revealed that Twitter had long used visibility filtering to limit the spread of certain accounts. Musk screamed about how this was horrible shadowbanning… but then proceeded to use those tools to suppress speech of people he disliked. And now he’s using the tool, at max power, to hide Taibbi and the very files that we were (falsely) told “exposed” how old Twitter shadow banned people.
This is way more ironic than the Alanis song.
So, yes, we went from Taibbi praising Elon Musk for supporting free speech and supposedly helping to expose the evil shadowbanning of the old regime, and refusing to criticize Musk on anything, to Taibbi leaving Twitter, and Musk not just unfollowing him but shadowbanning him and all his Twitter Files.
In about 48 hours.
Absolutely incredible.
Just a stunning show of leopard face eating.
Not much happened then on Sunday, though Twitter first added a redirect on any searches for “substack” to “newsletters” (what?) and then quietly stopped throttling links to Substack, though no explanation was given. And as far as I can tell, Taibbi’s account is still “max deboosted.”
Anyway, again, to be clear: Elon Musk is perfectly within his rights to be as arbitrary and capricious as he wants to be with his own site. But can people please stop pretending his actions have literally anything to do with “free speech”?
Filed Under: content moderation, elon musk, matt taibbi, mehdi hasan, shadowbanning, twitter files, visibility filtering
Companies: substack, twitter
Comments on “After Matt Taibbi Leaves Twitter, Elon Musk ‘Shadow Bans’ All Of Taibbi’s Tweets, Including The Twitter Files”
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But Not Good Enough
Awhile back, Elon took a poll asking Twitter if he should step down from being in charge of twitter. It looks like they were onto something. While Elon’s actions to free twitter from U.S. government influence and woke censorship are admirable, he hasn’t figured out a neutral system with which to replace it.
Re:
Moderation will always come with biases because moderation will always contain the biases of the people behind it. The only truly “neutral” form of moderation is no moderation at all, but that obviously won’t fix the issues that were and still are plaguing Twitter.
Also…
Yes or no, Koby: Do you believe the government should have the legal right to compel any privately owned interactive web service into hosting legally protected speech that the owners/operators of said service don’t want to host?
Re: Re:
Is this even slightly relevant to the story?
Re: Re: Don't argue using concepts you don't understand
well either that, or you are writing a 300 word reply to a post you didn’t bother to read
The dude could not possibly have been more clear that Musk has the total 100% right to do whatever he wants on his website, the only argument being made is for stupid ppl who for some reason dedicate their lives to licking the boots of particularly stupid billionaires to stop pretending that Musk is a defender of Free Speech
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Re: Re:
Yes, look at the PruneYard Shopping decision by the US supreme court, and a recent decision by the 5th circuit court of appeals holding exactly that.
Should the government be able to force your telephone company to host your speech? What about the “google voice” platform that owns my telephone number, isn’t that a “web service” or can the telephone company simply become a “web service”? What is the meaningful difference between TCP-IP being used by your browser, and the TCP-IP switching being used by the LTE baseband chip in your cellphone to make phone calls?
Re: Re: Re:
Oh, good, I get to rhetorically tear you apart.
No court has ever ruled that Pruneyard applies to social media platforms. And that besides, the years since Pruneyard have only narrowed its applicability to the meatspace locations in California that it covers.
Please cite the exact decision and the exact language of that decision. A refusal to do so, or an attempt to make me do your homework for you, will be considered a concession that your claim is bullshit.
Telephone service is, for the purposes of this discussion, a public utility. Your Internet access provider (i.e., your ISP) might qualify as a public utility, but that’s not settled law. Twitter is not a public utility in any way.
When you answer “yes” to my question, you’re expressing the belief that the government should have the right to make a platform like Twitter host any kind of speech. Your “yes” raises a different yes-or-no question: If you were running a social media service that explicitly banned anti-Musk speech, would you want the government to force you into hosting that speech?
Re: Re: Re:
A telephone company, the mail, parcel carriers and ISP’s are all carriers transporting something between sender and receiver. between parties They do not themselves make anything directly available to the public, nor is their business with one customer or patron affected by their business with different customers or patrons.
Social media on the other hand is a fancy notice board, making thing available to the public and their business with their customers and patrons is affected by what they allow other customers and patrons to display on their services. If a social media site refuse to host your content, you can use a different social media service. If you ISP refuses you and Internet connection you cannot use the Internet, and that difference is something you should consider.
Re: Re: Re:
Tell us uou’re completely clueless about Pruneyard without saying you’re completely clueless about Pruneyard.
Re: Re: Re:2 Cluelessness
I don’t prune the yard I mow it
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Wait… back the truck up…. aren’t you the guy who is always carrying on about how the government should force Twitter to not moderate the way that Twitter wants to moderate?
Doesn’t that seem s̶o̶m̶e̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ exactly like U.S. government influence?
Don’t you ever get tired of saying the same lie over and over again? Just because you keep repeating it, doesn’t make it true.
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Re: Re: Re:
No, I’m the guy who wants people to be able to have their day in court if a platform breaches their own terms of service. Typically, I’m accused of not desiring government involvement ENOUGH. You’re thinking of somebody else.
Re: Re: Re:
Yes or no, Koby: Do you believe the government should have the legal right to compel any privately owned interactive web service into hosting legally protected speech that the owners/operators of said service don’t want to host?
Re: Re: Re:
Why do we have the 1st amendment Koby?
Re: Re: Re: Court dates
There are several Virtual Private Server providers you can turn to that will be very happy to rent you time on an internet connected system. I believe AWS will allow you a single, small VPS for free. All you have to do is to put in the hundreds of thousands of paid man hours into writing code to duplicate some one else’s private property.
Just for reference, as somewhat capable programmer will cost you around $100,000.00 a year with benefits. I’d have to think for a bit, but even a limited twitter clone would likely take about 15 programmers most of a year for a very, very feature limited copy, and with that one free AWS instance, would struggle to serve more than somewhere around 3,000 simultaneous users, or call it about 1.5 million dollars for a poor 3,000 user Twitter clone exclusive of your bandwidth costs.
May we expect that check from you this week so we can assemble a team and get started?
Re: Re: Re:2
Or Koby could try to run his own Mastodon/ActivityPub instance and see how far that could take him. Or his own IRC server. Or forum running SimpleMachines.
Have fun with the assigned FBI agent once you cross certain lines regarding speech though! Considering Koby’s implied beliefs, I am very sure he’ll get one sooner or later!
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Re: Re: "woke censorship"
And the Techdirt cmty rushes to flag and hide yet another comment because you can never censor enough comments about censorship!
Re: Re: Re:
indeed poor “censored” commentors. There blatherings (err I mean comments) require people to click an extra time to be view (or if you have js off, a bit more work). That’s totally censorship, and harmful at that. Definitely not the community saying “we disagree with you, and think you can go sit in a corner where people have to look for you, instead of seeing you right away”.
/s
Re: Re: Re:2
Almost like max-deboosting, come to think of it…
Re: Re:
Make him define ‘woke’ in a way that doesn’t mean ‘leftwing’
Watch his head explode.
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
“Wokeness is a cult or secular religion which teaches that society systemically oppresses certain marginalized groups.
Society was built for the express purpose of oppressing these groups, and the only way to combat this oppression is to tear down society and restructure it according to the doctrines of the cult.
Nothing can exist for its own sake; everything must exist for the enforcement of the cult. The ultimate goal is equity, which means that the imagined oppression of the preferred groups is counteracted by policies which elevate those preferred groups. And each member inherits the collective guilt of the oppressor.”
Re: Re: Re:2
That sounds a whole lot like Nazism and white supremacy, Koby.
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Re: Re: Re:3 Re:
It sounds like you can’t disagree that it’s a definition not tailored to leftism. Woke and white supremacy have a lot in common.
Re: Re: Re:4
Not really. While both “wokeism” and white supremacy express a belief about systemic oppression, “wokeism” is about dismantling it and white supremacy is about upholding and expanding it.
Re: Re: Re:4
No, as defined, it couldn’t apply to white supremacy. You specifically mentioned tearing down society, which is exclusively leftwing.
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Re: Re: Re:5
It is certain that white supremacy, if applied to any major city in the USA, would be a societal teardown.
Re: Re: Re:6
To us, yes. To the white supremacists, it’s upholding it. Intent is key since we’re talking about political affiliations.
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Re: Re: Re:7
I guess that’s the problem. You can’t realize that the woke are also racists. You are too blinded by what you believe is a noble cause. Btw, that other group mentioned above from WW2 germany were also blinded by their noble fanaticism. Many similarities, indeed.
Re: Re: Re:8
The funny thing is, I bet you thought you had a point with this. But that one line implies that you believe “wokeism” is about revenge for the oppression that “woke” people are trying to tear down. I mean, do you really believe “woke” Black people want to enslave white people or some shit as payback for generations of systemic oppression?
Re: Re: Re:8
No. Racism wasn’t involved in anything I said, nor did your definition of “woke” entail racism necessarily or expressly mention it. It is irrelevant to my point.
I don’t recall saying that being woke is a noble cause to begin with. Maybe you should stop jumping to conclusions.
What I said is that white supremacists believe they are upholding society, while the “woke” as you defined it believe they are tearing it down. I then said that “wokeism” (as you defined it) is exclusively leftwing, but white supremacy is not.
None of that says that being “woke” is a noble cause, nor does it say that racists can’t be “woke”.
Re: Re: Re:4
First off, Koby you disingenious Nazi…
I don’t see any COMMIES with enough power and funding to destablilize the US. China has gone back to dynastic rule and “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”, Russia is a Chinese buffer state and take orders from Xi now, any Latin American country that describes itself as “socialist” are actually tinpot dictatorships, and, well, it turns out even in East Asia, the commies are so shit they couldn’t get voted in. No, North Korea is also a Chinese buffer state.
Secondly, the American “Left” has more in common with the British Empire, aka, “White Man’s Burden” than Nazi or Confederate ideology. The only difference is that the American Left worship at the altar of Wall Street rather than a feeble shithead king.
And guess what? Wall Street may be racist, but not “bring back slavery” levels of white supremacy. Or “blame the Jews for everything” levels of white supremacy.
You, on the other hand, hold values similar to the Kochs and Hitler rather than Wall Street.
Honestly, Koby, you could not pull the wool over my damn eyes. I know the difference.
Re: Re: Re:2
Hilariously that is not the wikipedia or multiple dictionary definitions of the term say. The only place to find that particular definition is… a couple of right wing news orgs.
Re: Re: Re:2
And once we take out the clearly pejorative judgments and reword what’s left so it sounds less bullshit…
…we end up with what looks like a fine (and factually accurate!) definition of “woke” to me.
(h/t to The Weekly Sift for inspiring this comment)
Re: Re: Re:3 'I'm already on top so equality is oppression!'
The damning part as always is when someone thinks that ‘believes there are systemic problems in society and wants to see them fixed’ is an insult, something which says so much more about the person saying it than the person they’re aiming it at.
Re: Re: Re:3
Also nonsensical term. “Secular religion” is self-contradictory.
Re: Re: Re:4
It depends on when you would ascribe godhood to the object or person of veneration, I guess.
Re: Re: Re:5
No, because secularism is literally defined as not religious.
Re: Re: Re:3 Nope
That definition of woke is accurate and explains why it’s toxic at the same time. You want to tear down society and replace it with a system that guarantees equity of outcome. That’s a good way to make sure we are all poor. Wokesters are just crabs in a bucket, wanting to pull everything down to the same level. Disgusting.
Re: Re: Re:4
I said “equitable treatment”, not “equity of outcome”. Society—i.e., the law and the systems that uphold it—should treat everyone equally by refusing to dole out privileges for race, religion, sex/gender, or whatever else. Whether someone sinks or swims in such a society would still be up to their own abilities.
Re: Re: Re:4
…said nobody mentally competent, ever.
Re: Re: Re:4
You will lie with the findom anal vore furries and you are going to fucking like it, you overprivileged breeder.
Re: Re: Re:2
In which case, wokeness doesn’t exist.
For something to be a cult requires a level of centralized organization not present or even alleged here (mere commonality of beliefs is insufficient to demonstrate organization, even if disagreement with said beliefs is suppressed, because there is no organization to be tied to), and “secular religion” doesn’t exist because the term “secular” inherently excludes religion by definition. Because the allegations fail to meet the definition of a cult, and “secular religion” is a nonsensical term, “wokeness” under this definition factually does not exist based on the allegations presented.
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Re: Re: Re:3
Agreed. Secularists could never threaten people who believe in an imaginary sky friend, and if they do, it’s because the idiots who believe in straight relationships deserve it.
Re: Re: Re:4
Yeah, none of that bears any resemblance to what I said, nor does it derive from anything I said. Take your craziness somewhere else.
Re: Re: Re:2
A “secular religion”? Are you effing kidding me?
Are you going to claim with a straight face that society has never systemically oppressed certain marginalized groups? That would be a boldly stupid position to take.
Re: Re: Re:3
I think it means adherence to a dogma that is not inherently religious.
Cults that begin with no basis in religion always come to resemble a religion eventually if they aren’t disbanded.
MLMs are very close to being cults (amongst other things) in my opinion. When I was a teenager I applied for a job which turned out to be an mlm scheme. They scared me so much I didn’t go back the next day
Re: Re: Re:4
Sure, but that would be “secular dogma” or a “secular cult”, not a “secular religion”.
Re: Re: Re:3
“secular religion”
Are we talking about football again?
Re: Re: Re: help from an unlikely source
DeSantis’ lawyers, asked in court to define ``woke”, were able to do so:
“The belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
https://t.co/O5HGJuJIay
Re: Re: Re:2
I wasn’t aware Koby was one of DeSantis’s lawyers
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free twitter from U.S. government influence and woke censorship
Now that the Twitter Files have been censored by Musk, would you consider that ‘woke’ or ‘unwoke’ censorship?
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For what it’s worth, we had said from the start that Musk was not going to be moderating neutrally like he promised and like you and others said he was going to.
Re:
…said nobody not on hallucinogens, ever.
Note to journalists
For all of you that still think Elon will give you any access if you just report positively on him, he is so far gone that he will happily kick anyone that happens to be near him during a tantrum.
Re:
Billionaires are never loyal to underlings or poorer people. They are only loyal to other billionaires, who understand that they will share the tumbrels if the oppressed masses ever get their shit together.
Musk only cares about one thing, and that’s Musk. Everyone else in his universe is simply a NPC.
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Shameful display
Even I must admit Musk acted very poorly here. This is why Trump will win 2024 and re-introduce the humane head-ripping-off machine to punish Matt for his crimes.
Re:
Maybe, but which Matt?
Re: Re:
Now that you mention it, I don’t think Matthew M’s been seen for a hot week, hasn’t he?
What would it take for Techdirt to stop using Twitter? What’s the argument for continuing to give it content when clearly Elon Musk is not going to change? You can’t fix him, or it, with any journalism. Just abandon it. The entire media has to let it die and move on.
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Re: Re:
It’s very difficult for any sort of news site to stop using twitter, on the grounds that twitter IS the news. It would require others to stop using it first, and then news sites could stop referring to it. Until then, folks reporting on events are a reactionary, not a leader.
Re: Re:
“twitter IS the news”
Only to morons. Even if you use Twitter for news, you have to be very foolish not to use other sources.
In reality, Twitter has been a major platform in the past, and has given journalists and the public alike unprecedented direct access to what many businesses, celebrities and politicians are saying, and the ability to communicate back in some cases. Musk is destroying more of that with his silliness over verification, so I assume it won’t last much longer. But, until then, it’s still a valid source of many, albeit not as good as t was before Musk got stoned that one fateful day.
Re: Re:
You can’t break a cycle by repeating it. Twitter is where the news is because the people making the news keep putting it there. Only they can make that change.
Re:
Stop using Twitter? Yes, I absolutely agree.
Stop writing articles of how Musk is mismanaging Twitter? No, we should highlighting that as much as possible so that others may see and hopefully conclude that it is in their best interest to stop using Twitter.
Re: Re:
Yes, obviously. It needs to be reported on and called out.
Re:
Likely, it would be for pretty much everyone to stop using Twitter. As long as people use Twitter, Techdirt—as a journalistic enterprise—has a reason to use Twitter if only to find out what people are saying on it and any changes made to the platform.
Because Musk isn’t the only beneficiary for the content; lots of people use Twitter who read Techdirt content but don’t use Mastodon, so there is at least some incentive there.
Plus, Mike has reduced the amount of content Techdirt publishes on Twitter substantially, so…
Re: Re:
The people consuming the news can’t break that cycle. They have to go get the news where it is. The only people who can do so are the ones putting it there. If it’s somewhere else the users can’t go to twitter to get it.
Re: Re: Re:
Speaking for myself, I don’t use Twitter for the news. I just go there for stuff about anime, video games, and VTubers.
But to your point, that argument only works if Twitter is the only place the news can be accessed in such a form. Mike is already addressing that by also posting on Mastodon.
Re:
Whether or not you like it, Twitter is still newsworthy. At the very least, there’s a lot of income, jobs, etc. that work around Twitter for the moment. That will probably soon fade as the site becomes increasingly unusable and other alternatives present themselves, but until the network effect kills it, it’s still the default platform for a lot of business.
But, even as it fails, the fact that a billionaire with a large fanbase nuked his own popularity and the business itself when he was forced to adhere to his own offer, and do so while displaying the worst management skills imaginable is still newsworthy.
Re: Re:
I didn’t say not to report about it. I said stop using it as a service.
Re: Re: Re:
Mike already uses Mastodon, and has done for a while. I’d assume there’s a business reason why Techdirt itself is still on Twitter, but I suspect the benefits to Twitter are negligible.
Re: Re: Re:2
If you tweet, retweet, like…even login on Twitter, you are helping Musk. Only the degree is debatable.
It is one’s choice of course, for many journos, it aids their livelihood. As long as journos remain on Twitter, it’ll thrive. There are currently no competing platforms big enough.
Re: Re: Re:3
“As long as journos remain on Twitter, it’ll thrive”
You and I seem to have different definitions of the word “thrive”.
“There are currently no competing platforms big enough.”
Another thing I find fun noting is how people define competition with Twitter depending on how narrow their current complain it. Twitter has a great many competitors, some bigger, many smaller. There’s nothing that Twitter does that I can’t do on Facebook, Reddit, or any other social media or discussion service.
The one thing that Twitter offered as a “killer” feature was direct access to people, which used to be driven by their verification model. That is if I want to keep up with what, say, Stephen King is saying, I get direct access to that and I can be confident that what he says under his account is actually being said by him (or an authorised assistant, as some people do, though I don’t believe King does), and not an imposter. With Musk killing verification and making its replacement useless for that purpose, that effect is reduced.
But, I don’t currently have a choice of venue – if I want to read what a person says, I have to go to where they’re saying it. I can read about his tweets in r/stephenking, but I don’t have the option to respond in a way to engage with King directly. The only fix for that is for King himself to post elsewhere, and this is how the network effect is currently keeping Twitter propped up. Journalists can also go elsewhere, but if the people they need to engage with are still using Twitter, they still have to use Twitter even if they’re trying to set up elsewhere. They can make a stand and not use Twitter, but if their subjects and readers don’t so the same it won’t help anyone.
So, no, I do not buy that Twitter has no real competition. There’s just not a direct one-click solution to clone everything that Twitter has operated with the same feature set. We will see if there’s the same MySpace to Facebook pipeline where everyone abandons it for the same platform, or whether we’ll have a more fragmented effect where some go to Mastodon or a similar clone of the superficial feature set, some go to established alternatives like Instagram, some go to a new startup, etc.
But, Twitter has plenty of competition, unless you’re going to define it to a very narrow set of features rather than “social media where people go to communicate with the people they wish to follow”. As with all social media, it’s just down to the “network effect” of where people decide to go, and whether people follow them when they do.
Re:
“You can’t fix him”
Oh, and, you might misunderstand the conversation generally. People aren’t trying to “fix” him, they’re laughing at him, while trying to explain to casual observers how obviously destructive his moves are. The fact that these moves are happening at least daily does not mean people are trying to “fix” them, more that they’re stating why it’s a bad idea for egomaniac micromanagers with no idea of their own limitations to be in charge of people who know what they’re doing.
Re: Re:
If you don’t think the problem can be fixed by reporting on it, then there’s no reason to keep using the platform. Report about it, but stop using it to distribute your news.
Re: Re: Re:
“If you don’t think the problem can be fixed by reporting on it”
No problem can be fixed merely by reporting. But, I’ve seen beneficial effects by doing so – for example, when Musk’s latest boneheaded move regarding a competitor is reported, someone say “oh, I’ve not heard of that one, let me check it out”. Or, something is the actual last straw for someone so they quit.
There’s no guarantees, but it’s actually possible to get these stories out to people who wouldn’t read them if they weren’t on Twitter.
Re: Re: Re:
Who said that the platform was the only target to be fixed? Letting users of the platform know is a sufficient reason IMO.
Re:
Well, while there are several options for most people, there are still a lot of people who do rely on Twitter for… just about everything.
For example, the Japanese. Getting them to move to a service that ISN’T plagued by NFT scum is gonna take a lot of work.
lol. lmao.
Oh look, Musk censoring Taibbi. Twitter is really censoring right wing speech now. Time for the “conservatives” to call out Musk. Right?
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Oh yeah, they’re guaranteed to start losing their collective shit any minute now. That idiot Matt Bennett will show up and tell us how disappointed he is in Elon and how this has shattered his confidence in him as a ‘free speech absolutist.’
I’m sure they’ll actually call out Musk.
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Only for not screwing Taibbi harder.
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Elon has been making some bad calls lately. Some of us were hopeful that the Eliza Blue censorship episode was a one-off due to some kind of personal relationship? But then it continued, such as with the day of vengeance censorship last week. Conservative criticism has been already been ongoing, and now this will likely increase the volume.
Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
in the fief of the Master, Don Elon Musk.
Behold a pale dick: and his name that sat on him was Matt Bennett
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The man in Twitter Blue fled across the Internet, and the nuthuggers followed.
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In reference to Stephen King’s involvement in all this, the Gunslinger reference is welcomes. Thankee sai
There’s only one question now.
Who’s next on the list to be thrown under the Cybertrucks, fleets of Teslas, and presumably, Chinese tanks?
The rubber chicken is new. And typical of Musk’s juvenile sense of humour
The real problem with Elon Musk is that he thinks he’s amusing. What we need is a cage match between him and Trump. To the death, of course. THAT would be amusing.
'Not MY face!'
You’d think someone who styles himself a reporter would have seen that coming.
And lo, to the surprise of none but mocking laughter of many the man who condemned the silencing of dissenting voices when he wasn’t in charge immediately sileneced the words of one who bent over backwards to stroke his ego the second he stepped out of line by not making The Great and Mighty Elon look constantly good.
While pointing out Elon’s gross hypocrisy is always worth a laugh I think it’s worthwhile to consider how many other accounts he’s done this to, because if he’s willing to treat someone who was that close like this it’s near impossible to believe that he hasn’t done similar to other accounts before now.
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If anything, the way he’s treated even the acolytes who boasted about how hardcore they were and how willing they were to sleep at their desks under an environment of permanent crunch time should have been a huge warning sign.
If someone can look at that and not realize that something was very, very wrong, they were basically saps for Elon from the get go. They genuinely do not deserve any sympathy for choosing to let someone throw them under the bus.
Taibbi's tweets are searchable
The issue with searching “from:mtaibbi” never replicated for me. It returns results as normal right now – but I remember that I tried that search as soon as I saw this news, and it wasn’t ever blocked for me.
Maybe it’s because I’m in the EU? Musk’s tantrums are so parochial that those who implement his orders don’t bother to check whether they had an effect outside the USA?
Or maybe a temporary glitch, like Twitter is having all the time recently, was misunderstood.
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Fake news Masnick strikes again
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Amtaibbi&src=typed_query&f=top
Wow, there is no shadow ban, its probably some made up bullshit.
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You aren’t particularly bright, are you?
Have a guess why you could search and find Taibbi on Twitter today but not earlier.
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Ummm…. you do realize that it would be very easy for Musk to have un-shadowbanned him since this article was written don’t you?
Or do you not know how time works?
But there are screenshots as proof that searching Taibbi’s Twitter account returned zero results.
That you refuse to believe the reality of it, is a you problem.