Mr. Muskâs team also held meetings with undecided employees who are key to Twitterâs operations to try to persuade them to stay, three people said. In his pitch, Mr. Musk said that he knew how to win and that those who wanted to win should join him, one person who spoke with him said.
I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot. (âOther social mediaâ sometimes coming into play after ejection from Twitter.) When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.
Iâm not claiming that Twitter is the sole influence, of course. Traditional demons summoned by great wealth have not vanished. I have no access to what goes on in the brains of other people. What Iâm talking about is plain public behavior. The personalities of a great many famous and powerful people have changed in a similar way â a way we could do without.
I believe âTwitter poisoningâ is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. Itâs a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.
The same could be said about any number of other figures, including on the left. Examples are found in the excesses of cancel culture and joyless orthodoxies in fandom, in vain attention competitions and senseless online bullying. (...)
“…Warning of an overbearing attitude by Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg in the face of the events in the United States – and the suspension of Donald Trump’s accounts on that company’s platforms – President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that it is important to create alternative media as a counterweight to the actions of executives from social networks and traditional media.
In answering a question, related to what happened in the neighboring country, he said that his government will support the alternative media, to guarantee the people the right to information, in the face of the risk that the traditional ones and the networks tend to believe a world media power, a Holy Inquisition that censors and silences….”
"And it wasn’t just Trump. Accounts are vanishing quickly, including some popular Trump supporter accounts. I myself have lost hundreds of followers on Twitter in the last few hours, and I’ve seen people saying they lost a lot more.
"It also wasn’t just Trump supporters; leftist accounts are getting suspended too. The online left is hopefully learning that cheering for Twitter “banning fascists” irrationally assumes that (A) their purges are only banning fascists and (B) they are limiting their bans to your personal definition of fascists. There is no basis whatsoever for either of these assumptions.
At last we're safe! This threat has passed. Now to deal with lesser matters, like the nuclear launch codes.
I know it's a joke, but I seriously feel like there are more/better safeguards between him and damage with nukes, than there are between him and twitstarting (twitstigating?) another mob riot.
