medium started doing the same shit, sometimes it has interesting articles I’d like to read, but then they started putting in behind registration so I just no longer open medium links.

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• *changes URL to nitter.net*

Step 3: Profit!

He bought the users. Elon knows that people are lazy and will not change websites.

Let’s be honest Elon doesn’t care about Twitter.

He bought it with money he doesn’t have. He only increased in net worth since the takeover and has successfully done what he wanted to, destroy an organization he thought was problematic and now everyone gives even more data to Facebook.

Everyone of them won.

The biggest obstacle to spreading far-right propaganda has always been finding a platform.

Before the internet, when neonazis tried to shove racist leaflets into peoples pockets at punk gigs, they’d be immediately run out of the venue, despite “angry, dissaffected, young people” being exactly the kind of vulnerability they were looking for.

When the internet did come along, initially things weren’t much better. Sure, there were sites like Stormfront, but nobody went there. So instead they’d “raid” other forums to spread their shitty views, getting instantly banned because they hadn’t figured out how to be a Nazi with plausible deniability yet.

When they finally nailed that, it was a big moment for them.

Historically, mainstream media also never gave a fuck what the opinions of Nazis were. But the moment they rebranded to “alt-right”, the psycopathic, for-profit, neoliberal media companies saw a way to make some quick cash without having to openly admit they were functioning as a mouthpiece for people with swastika tattoos.

From there, the “mask on, hide your powerlevel” stategy was codified. 4chan and far-right Discord servers openly stategized about how to do it best, such as presenting their dogshit opinions as popular, moderate beliefs and blaming progressives for their asshole personalities.

By the time Charlottesville’s swastika-waving parade and domestic-terrorism-finale happened, it was too late. Key figures in the far-right funnel had settled into social media like bedbugs at a two-star hotel.

Whenever a platform tried to get rid of them, they’d slip away through cracks in the walls. They would get banned and create new accounts that were slightly toned down, searching for that sweet spot of “as far-right as we can get away with”. They’d move to another major platform (or somewhere else on the same platform), because there was no coordinated effort to remove them for good.

But despite the slow, uncordinated response from social media sites, it was starting to work, especially on Twitter. By the time you’d hidden how far-right you were, you could no longer spread your message. Nobody was fooled by the dog whistles, fake engagement and flowery misrepresentations of “freedom of speech” any more.

Intially, they tried their own mask-off Twitter with Truth Social (who conspiciously aren’t being sued by Musk for being a Twitter clone). But the numbers were dogshit. It had a fraction of the traffic and everybody there was already far-right. You could keep them frothy, but you couldn’t breed more of them.

So Musk bought Twitter. Ideally, he wanted to just hand one of the big three socials back to right-wing reactionaries ane extremists but he also has no problem just killing the platform.

The only thing that mattered was that the deplatforming stopped, before people realised that it works and makes sites 1000x better.

Dude could have created his own Mastodon insrance for practically nothing. Is he somehow even dumber than Trump?

Simple. He didn’t shit-talk Truth Social in a legally binding way and then have his bluff called by people with enough financial resources to survive the lengthy court battle.

He probably experiences less personal financial loss from running Twitter into bankruptcy now that he has been forced to buy it. He even gets to use it as his personal ego-stroking machine in the meantime.

But he may have experienced significant personal loss had he decided to continue fucking around with the SEC (or was it one of the other agencies?), whom he had previously pissed off.

If you view his words and actions through the lens of what will make him the most money or lose him the least, his actions make sense. Add a significant dash of arrogant impulsive invincibility too. He’s comfortable telling us about Twitter’s financial problems because starving it gets rid of it and let’s him focus on his other vanity projects.

It’s not like they can send him to jail for being a bad manager. It’s not like he’s going to pay his bills. It’s not like he even used all of his own money to buy Twitter in the first place. What does it matter to him?

Thanks to Elon, there will never be another Arab Spring. Most of the money came from investors where that is a big plus. Elon invested a surprisingly small amount of his own money given the 44b total. Even a shattered Twitter will be a bigger soapbox than truth social. 6-8B of his own money, which he may have already extracted from twitter as a loan, is not a big deal to him.

People actually use that trash? Education is key people.

I’m still convinced there is money coming in from an outside influence that is paying him to destroy Twitter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing is happening to Reddit as well

He wanted to prove he doesn’t care about money and is fully willing to throw away $44 billion dollars on a shitpost

OK ill have to steal this one

Go fac die back.Mock woke go broke. Insist on heros retain zeros.

I still think the “saudi’s paid elon to nuke it” was a solid conspiracy theory.

Didn’t you know? Acknowledging any cause would be censorship /s

Not losing money, just having “negative cash flow”.

100% of the ads I see on Twitter today are dropshipping scams, while in the pre-musk era they were highly targeted to my job and interests to the point that if there wasn’t the “ad” tag I couldn’t distinguish that.

They can’t cost the same for the advertiser, a generic dropshipping scam that targets everyone must be cheap

Why would he tweet about his losses in the first place? I applaud his openness (/s) but I doubt any investors or advertisers will come running to a dying social networking.

Indeed. Elon is a pathalogical liar.

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Who would have thought actively courting Nazis would make risk averse corporations stop using your ads!

Nobody could have foreseen this! Nobody! Unless by some miracle they happened to look up who’s advertising on far-right platforms like Gab or Pravda Social.

But I thought free speech meant no consequences?! /s

He probably only wants to try that after exhausting all ways of fucking it up. You’d think that will be soon, but he’s pretty creative in this regard.

Disagree, when Twitter first came about it was actually possible to connect with people around specific topics, and was originally mostly random celebrities, news/journalists, and tech nerds. It was a very different vibe in my experience.

My brother is in the space program in the army & has worked with SpaceX on several projects. He says Elon is the master at smudging numbers to make things appear they are better than they are or not as bad as the true numbers would suggest so I guarantee the same applies here. I’m sure the actual figures are much, much worse.

That’s actually a better outcome, quarantine the crazies in twitter and/or reddit while the mainstream happens in the fediverse.

I don’t see Twitter failing. Perhaps this is just going according to plan too. I think the more likely case is that it becomes something like a social network version of Fox.

Im pretty bummed Blue Sky chose to write their own protocol. Many of my friends who are not techie chose to go there rather than learn the fediverse.