"I Picked The Wrong Day To Start Sniffing Glue"
Twitter is becoming the playground of Right-wing trolls who traffic in hate speech.
I never cease to be amazed at how seriously some Conservatives take themselves. It isn’t easy to imagine that so many with so little self-awareness have attained such prominence, yet their voices have become so amplified that people on the Far-Right seem to pay attention.
Take Donald Trump, Jr., f’rinstance. I’d defy anyone to listen to the 97 seconds of whatever it is he’s blathering about and make sense of it. I like to think I’m a person of reasonably adept intelligence, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I spent most of the time trying to figure out if he was high. That’s the only thing that could’ve explained the rapid-fire gibberish and the jump-cuts.
And, no, I don’t think he’s OK. He reminds me of Lloyd Bridges’ character from Airplane:
“I picked the wrong day to start sniffling glue!!”
So when is reasoned debate not exactly “reasoned?” How about when Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a megaphone for Right-wing hate speech? He’s attracted rabid, hate-driven Conservatives back to the platform and alienated thousands of Liberals, who’ve left in droves.
If Twitter indeed “aims to serve” the “center 80% of people, who wish to learn, laugh, & engage in reasoned debate,” Musk’s done an exceedingly poor job of demonstrating it. He seems to have little concept of where the center can be found.
Unless he’s talking about trying to find the center of the Right-wing, in which case he seems to have found his sweet spot. But if Elon Musk thinks reasonable people will stick around while Twitter progressively degrades into a cesspool of hate speech, racism, misogyny, and homophobia.
This is not the work of someone who promised to be a “free speech absolutist.” Or someone who vowed to turn Twitter into an electronic village town square- unless his vision is to metaphorically arm the villagers with torches and pitchforks. Instead, Elon Musk has transformed his new toy into the technological equivalent of a Potemkin village inhabited by racists, homophobes, and misogynists.
Just pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. He thinks he’s doing a bang-up job.
This is not your father’s Twitter, y’all. For someone who’s said he wants to appeal to the “center 80%,” he has a very odd idea of what constitutes the “center.”
Musk has also been reinstating all sorts of Right-wing trolls, including people who were previously permanently suspended for hate speech, inciting violence, and just generally not playing well with others.
Meanwhile, people who’ve been suspended for truly stupid reasons (like me) remain permanently suspended. I’m still unsure how I feel about that; part of me wonders if I really want/need to be part of the cesspool that Twitter seems to be on its way to becoming.
Then again, there are still people on Twitter worth following. There’s still discourse worth having and following. I can still follow it; I just can’t participate. But for what I do here, I can use Twitter enough to give me what I need. So if that’s all I get, I’ll live with that. After all, I was suspended on April 1st of this year, and I haven’t noticed my quality of life decline, so it would seem that life without Twitter is indeed possible.
I’ve migrated to Mastodon, which is one of the places thousands of those who’ve come fed up with Musk’s cesspool have fled to. These days, I can be found at @yuppieskum@mstdn.social - and even if I am restored to full functionality at Twitter, I don’t know that I’d go back.
I’m saddened to see what Elon Musk is doing to the platform I joined in 2008. Over the 14 years I was allowed to participate, Twitter became a tremendously powerful and vital communication tool for millions worldwide. To see it turned into a Right-wing cesspool and a playground for racists, homophobes, misogynists, and haters of all stripes is quite depressing.
No person should have that kind of power, yet $44 billion bought Musk precisely that.
It’s amazing what you can f**k up if you have enough money.
