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 wouldn’t call it “surreal” at all, I’d call it “completely expected” given who runs that platform
Elon Free Speech Musk himself? Never!
He must have a tiny pp to be that insecure
Elon Musk’s pp? As it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end. Very tiny.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
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.”
Fediverse is waiting.
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!
Séamas gave us of the funniest story threads I’ve ever read on that cursed site: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/992006545473966082.html
This should be the post. Much better!
Yup - this is one that stayed with me. This has earned a place in internet history.
Lmao that was gold.
Holy shit, thanks for that
Social networks that do this should lose any safe harbor provisions. Government are so fucking far behind with basic common sense.
Absolutely. You cannot claim safe harbor while banning stuff like this.
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.)
I’d argue, oddly, that it’s easier to hold a single corporate entity accountable for data breaches than mastodon instance owners.
It’s likely the case that both of are bad from a data security point of view, but at least with the corporations you know who to shout at.
** edit just realised that mastodon may not work in the exact same way as Lemmy when it comes to instance owners, I’d have to look that up.
First, I agree with what you’re saying here about the privacy issue.
The other side of that is that companies or even individual journalists could just spin up their own instance and not allow outsiders to sign up.
However, there needs to be a critical mass of engaged people. I don’t know what Mastodon’s engagement looks like but I can’t imagine it’s very high. With even the slightest barrier to entry beyond “sign up with your email address on our main site” there will never be as much engagement as a simpler platform. On top of that, a lot of news outlets consider hot takes on the social media site formerly known as Twitter to be news. So they embed dumb opinions from there in loads of “articles”.
It’s going to be a long road for them to leave and when they do it likely won’t be to join the Fediverse.
STOP USING TWITTER, DUMBASS.
The author’s account had over 100,000 followers and was around 14 years old, he said
Well there’s your problem, it’s 14 so Daddy Musk started taking an interest in fucking it.
First off, just call it Twitter.
Second, get off Twitter!
Has this “journalist” been in a coma since twitters purchase? One of the first things done was the removal of ‘elonjet’ and a plethora of elon critics
If you ever question whether Eløn is actually a free speech absolutist, we can all point to cases like this.
We need a big exodus of media then the platform would be dead for sure.
Llama still inhabiting former llama enclosure (recently and very publicly converted to a tiger pen) confused by strange occurrence of tiger bites.
Quit. Using. Twitter.
Person eating shit: THIS TASTES BAD, SOMEBODY SHOULD CHANGE THE TASTE
Quit eating shit.
But all my friends are in the shit restaurant!
Anyone surprised by Musky at this point only has themselves to blame.
