The author’s account had over 100,000 followers and was around 14 years old, he said
Journalist says he finds it ‘surreal’ to have account on X suspended after writing critique of platform::The author’s account had over 100,000 followers and was around 14 years old, he said
I was on the fence about leaving...I didn't use it very much to begin with, but it was useful for checking in on bands for whom Twitter was their preferred social media.
But the day that I read that Twitter was considering accepting Lone Skum''s offer to buy it, I immediately deleted my account. Whether he ended up buying it or not, the fact that they'd even consider his offer told me all I needed to know. Twitter had become such an essential tool for so many oppressed people across the globe that for them to even entertain the idea of selling it to that pompous, no-talent cunt in order to enrich their shareholders was enough to hasten my exit.
That being said, once that sale was made...while I'd have preferred to see $44 billion go to the working class instead of a bunch of wealthy shareholders, I am much happier seeing it split up instead of remaining in the coffers of a bigoted fuck billionaire whose own kid disowned him. Fuck him.
It was enough of a dumpster fire before it got all musky. After it got the preputial gland the edgelords became MOR and there was no arguing past their mechanical circle jerk of atavism.
You'd be surprised. There's a ton of people who came to Lemmy due to the Reddit API fiasco and still visit there daily, Twitter addiction is no different.
O’Reilly said if he did not get his account back it would be “personally, quite annoying but professionally quite depressing” as Twitter was his route into his current profession as a journalist and author. He used it as a “shop front” in ways, he said.
“I was very, very reluctant to be a Twitter doomer because it had done so much for me... But it’s really at the point where it doesn’t really work in practical terms. It is not as useful as an object as it used to be. It incentivises lots of extremely negative and hateful speech and has really made that a big kind of calling card of its business for the last year or two... that you can go on there and say anything.”
i hate banning anyone as much as the next anarcho-dingus but afaik there's no law against banning whoever you want and i'm not sure there should be one. i don't know what the answer is, if it isn't public control of all social media.
maybe some public funded internet services such as defederated twitter and reddit alternatives? completely open and paid for with taxes, in direct competition with their for-profit contemporaries.
The suspension cited platform manipulation and spam as its reasoning, which he wrote in his appeal that he had nothing to do with.
So the only conclusion we can draw here is that writing an article critical of Twitter because it's overrun with (paid) spambots now constitutes "platform manipulation."
Elon in 2022: I wanna get rid of all the spambots!
Elon in 2024: You're banned for being mean to the spambots!
It's time for news orgs and journalists to say a) "we're hosting our content on our own Mastodon server and that will be the source of truth for federated platforms (eventually including Threads and Bluesky)", b) "we will mirror the content across non-federated social media platforms that support free and fair reporting".
In other words give Twitter the middle finger and make the content available everywhere.
I just wish that a free-speech-absolutist-billionaire would buy the platform so things like this wouldn’t happen anymore. He could even rename it something cool (like ‘Y’ or ‘Z’) to get some street-cred with edgy middleschoolers..
Clearly Seamas has not spent much time on message boards.
All sad jokes aside: This really is a problem. Ignoring the evangelizing for a moment, we have been watching someone who owes his entire life to apartheid destroying the most democratized "free speech" platform for over a year now. And, with the increasing wariness of venture capital to burn money for a decade at a time, we are unlikely to see anything like it ever agian. Because bluesky and threads started with corporate interests and Mastodon has serious privacy concerns due to the amount of data that instance owners have access to.
This has very much been a "something has died forever" kind of experience.
Because bluesky and threads started with corporate interests and Mastodon has serious privacy concerns due to the amount of data that instance owners have access to.
Don't Bluesky and Threads have similar serious privacy concerns? Those running them would, I think, have similar if not even more access to people's information, depending on how much their respective apps request. Mastodon and its apps on the other hand, generally don't request as much access to one's information, meaning instance owners arguably have much less to snoop through.
It's always weird to me when a social media app tries to brag about "privacy". You know once you post something publicly, it's out there forever, right? And if you want private, direct messaging, there are apps for that. (And they integrate with Lemmy/Mastodon a hell of a lot better than proprietary apps.)
100% agree. I just find it utterly hypocritical that he proclaimed himself at "a free-speech absolutionist" and cries like a little baby the moment someone says something bad about him.
An entitled racist piece of shit coward doesn’t like negativity directed toward him, on the platform he bought so he could be an entitled racist piece of shit coward.
Imagine that.
Why anyone still has an account on that embarrassing shithole of a social media platform is beyond me. And why a journalist is dumb enough to to find it “surreal” that this happened in the first place, is equally baffling.