Twitter agrees to Elon Musk buyout, a reminder we're on Mastodon

Musk buying Twitter gives me hope. Twitter was a social media platform that turned partisan. Musk is the biggest chance for it to go back to being a neutral platform. If it doesn't, it likely won't be worse than it is now. If he turns it into a partisan platform for the other party, then at least there will be one platform that's for a different party, a different ideology, compared to all the other big platforms that are all partisan for the same side.

Hopefuly it goes back to being neutral as twitter is a big reason there is so much hatred for one side over the other as partisan folks took over and started censoring everyone else under the guise of Misinformation, hatred , racism, bigotry ETC ETC


Last edited by tohur on 26 April 2022 at 2:02 am UTC

Musk's buyout of Twitter might just be enough to convince me to use it. It was nothing but an echo chamber for the left prior to the buyout, and frankly, that's boring to read and really nauseating. Neutrality is very much welcomed.

Twitter is one of the worst platforms on the internet. Its algorithms and formatting are intentionally designed to destroy any nuance and promote the most disagreed with positions at the top of every reply. Yet ironically it's still an echo chamber because of the lack of dislikes and the moderation tools each user has for replies. It's basically Reddit if Reddit only sorted by controversial. Plus it runs absolutely terribly on mobile unless you use their app.

While it's not impossible, I find it hard to imagine Elon making it any worse of a platform.

Also, 280 characters is inadequate for in-depth discussion or analysis, but more than enough for trolling and racial slurs.

I don't have a Twitter account and I never will. Elon or no Elon. The three biggest shareholders of Twitter before were Blackrock; Vanguard; and Morgan Stanley. Two shady companies and a big bank. Really one shady company as the biggest shareholder of Blackrock is Vanguard. Who are the next biggest ? State Street Corporation; Aristotle Capital Management, LLC; Geode Capital Management, LLC and Barclays. More banks and hedgefunds. Where was the outrage when this was the status quo ? Where was the outrage when speech was being censored before Elon. That's right there was next to none. Those who cared about free speech were on platforms that did as well. All of this outrage is either manufactured or people are even more dense and uninformed than I gave them credit for and in that case I don't care about their opinion anyway. Between the companies I listed I have found dozens of lawsuits and trials that did not end in their favor. These are not saints or good companies but Twitter users kept using their product without any complaints. Elon may be just as bad but at this point he sure isn't that much worse. Keep using Twitter; Reddit; Instagram; Youtube and Facebook but spare the moral outrage because nobody who uses these platforms has a moral leg to stand on.

You don't end up being one of the richest people on the planet by being charitable. Elon's not buying Twitter out of some notion of promoting free speech. He's either doing it to stroke his ego and/or he sees a way to make it profitable either directly or indirectly through the manipulation of information. The fact that he wants to add in verification to separate bot accounts from genuine ones sounds like he wants an account to be directly tied to exact details of the person behind the account which would make the data collected about the account holder that much more lucrative. There's no way Twitter will become neutral as the constant conflict is what drives engagement and is what draws people to Twitter. All the "free speech" alternatives just turn into echo chambers that are so toxic as to not be advertise-able. The people who got banned from Twitter were banned because they made the platform look bad and less advertiser friendly. At best Elon is going to bring back some of the popular dissenters to pay lip service to free speech and proceed to use the platform to shape the flow of information to his advantage. I'm sure it'll remain the toxic cesspool it's known for because that's what drives the engagement.

The fact that anyone seriously believes a billionaire has any interest in the welfare of anyone else besides their own is mind boggling. You don't get that rich by giving a damn about other people.


Last edited by Theodis on 26 April 2022 at 4:03 am UTC

Honestly, I've got no strong opinions about Elon, but I don't think this is gonna result in anything but good things, since he apparently wants to open source twitter, and the idea of free speech being enforced equally (assuming he stays true to his word) is nothing but a good thing in my eyes. However, this probably isn't enough to get me to use twitter. It's still a cesspool. This won't make it any worse.

I wish there was a website like twitter, where you have the freedom to say anything you want, EXCEPT political discussion was just straight banned, cold turkey, left and right wing, so people can focus on collaboration/promotion of neat projects first and foremost without being at each other's throats for 5 seconds, like, I enjoy stuff like #ScreenshotSaturday but I don't want to follow a game project for example and have the game developer whining about something happening in the world on main when I've likely already heard about it elsewhere ad nauseum by that point and it gets tiring especially since I'm there just to follow the project not get inundated with more divisive and abrasive BS.

I genuinely believe political discussion and involvement is the most effective way to create problems that would have otherwise not existed in projects that should be otherwise unrelated to it, such as the recent node-ipc disaster, where it doesn't matter how good your intentions are, you know what they say about where that road you're paving is going.

I didn't realize that twitter was a cornerstone of democracy until now /s last time I checked Jamiroquai was using it to spread false information./s

Not sure if Twitter is a cornerstone of democracy, but to be fair I'm pretty sure all cornerstones of democracy get used to spread false information, starting with print newspapers, moving on to political speeches and leaders' debates . . .

Reminder that 'Mastodon' is not a single site, it's a software stack using a W3C protocol (ActivityPub, so the flagship/example mastodon.social site isn't any more 'Mastodon' than Yahoo Mail or GMail is all of 'E-mail' (though lots of people don't make that distinction in the latter case either).

Not just people. I work for a university, so my email address is for the university's email server (just like the old days). I've been booking some hotel rooms lately; on booking.com when I enter my email address, it turns red and has a warning that my email address is probably wrong, do I want to change it and did I mean @gmail.com not what I actually typed? Luckily it doesn't enforce its ignorance, but it's still annoying.

Incidentally I too stay off social media; the closest I come is, um, conversations on GoL. That's sort of sociable, right?

Fixing freedom of speech on Twitter? How so?

About the only things that come to mind are Trump and COVID misinformation type stuff being blocked/censored.

I am familiar with a person who grumbles often that they were banned from Twitter for life for calling some senator a "twatwaffle".

Unlike corporate social media being at the whims of shareholders, or the board, or private investors, advertisers, etc., we can have our own, independent communities, and choose who we associate with (or not). That is empowering by design, at the root of it all, way more than even the richest people on the planet can hope for with purchases like these.

Creating bubbles and echo chambers so you don't have to see things you don't agree with and surrounding yourself only with people who agree with you is not empowering.
It's the opposite, it increases extremist viewpoints, reinforces a weak-minded attitude and makes people unable to deal with different viewpoints. It's what lead to the current climate to begin with. It's making everyone weaker,

Given Elon Musk's childlike understanding of free speech (basically what he likes is good, what he doesn't like is bad) things are about to go from bad to worse on Twitter.

That's probably your understanding of it and you are projecting, but it clearly isn't Elon's.
It is certainly the viewpoint of the people currently running Twitter (and their obviously one-sided and biased application of their own rules), hence this change is at least potentially a good one.

The fact that anyone seriously believes a billionaire has any interest in the welfare of anyone else besides their own is mind boggling. You don't get that rich by giving a damn about other people.

Could your remarkable envy and irrational hate of people who are capable of managing money be any more obvious?

If you have money, it becomes exceedingly easy to make more of it following some basic rules. You don't need to be a full-on selfish a***ole in order to achieve that. The system is rigged, yes, but being rich doesn't make anyone bad.

I wish there was a website like twitter, where you have the freedom to say anything you want, EXCEPT political discussion was just straight banned, cold turkey, left and right wing, so people can focus on collaboration/promotion of neat projects first and foremost without being at each other's throats for 5 seconds, like,

You wish, I wish, a lot of people wish that... but somehow this has never been made :(

Independent of all of that, I do hope this makes Twitter a better and more open place.
I tried Gabber, I tried Minds, I tried Odysee (as a YT alternative), I tried lots of different ones, but they all suffer from most of their userbase being people who were either banned from other places for having an unpopular opinion or from people who were looking for echo chambers. And as such, they (mostly) became echo chambers of their own, even if they were not originally meant to be that way.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 26 April 2022 at 8:17 am UTC

Bret Taylor, Twitter's Independent Board Chair, said, "The Twitter Board conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process to assess Elon's proposal with a deliberate focus on value, certainty, and financing. The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter's stockholders."

Remember kids, corporations are not your friends. Unless you are a shareholder, then they begrudgingly care about you until you own a significant chunk of shares and then they will pretend to actually be a friend.

I love it, all the right people are screeeeching

Twitter is a leftwing echo chamber. Trump gets banned while (true!) Information about Hunter Biden supressed.

And the "covid-disinformation"-hammer is also great: Lableak-Theory was once a bannable offence, now it's credible. What changed? The President. When Trump said it -> Disinformation. Now Biden said it -> credible.

Sure, we should not tolerate calls for violence against others. But then why are there terror groups still on Twitter?

As many said before: Musk cannot make it worse, let's hope we get a fair and open town square with no or at least less bias.

Musk's buyout of Twitter might just be enough to convince me to use it. It was nothing but an echo chamber for the left prior to the buyout, and frankly, that's boring to read and really nauseating. Neutrality is very much welcomed.

Hahaha sorry but that's hilarious. Both sides always think it's against them. I'm on the "Left" and see absolutely masses of right wing bull. It's very easy to find too.

I find some of the comments about the current political situation of Twitter, with talk of "both sides" and "the left" rather amusing. And very, very American.
That is, they indulge the tendency to see mainstream United States politics as representing all possible political division, with Republicans representing "the right" and Democrats somehow representing "the left", and that "one side" and "other side" being all the sides that can exist. Speaking as an actual leftist, I think it's important to point out that by historical and international standards, the US Democrats are not a left political formation, or a centrist one, or a centre-right one. They are an economically hard right wing party with some progressive-identity-politics window dressing (and a small, ineffectual centrist wing). Modern US mainstream politics takes up a very tiny slice even of what's been considered possible in the US in the past, let alone everywhere else.

Twitter is probably one of the contributing factors to this extreme impoverishment of the modern US political landscape.

Fixing freedom of speech on Twitter? How so?

About the only things that come to mind are Trump and COVID misinformation type stuff being blocked/censored.

I am familiar with a person who grumbles often that they were banned from Twitter for life for calling some senator a "twatwaffle".

Everyone should be free to call senators twatwaffles.

Independent of all of that, I do hope this makes Twitter a better and more open place.
I tried Gabber, I tried Minds, I tried Odysee (as a YT alternative), I tried lots of different ones, but they all suffer from most of their userbase being people who were either banned from other places for having an unpopular opinion or from people who were looking for echo chambers. And as such, they (mostly) became echo chambers of their own, even if they were not originally meant to be that way.

It would be extremely hypocritical of me to pass judgment upon other people for wanting an echo chamber when I'm literally saying I wish for a website that bans a particular kind of discussion, I just simply personally believe that when it comes to software projects that are unrelated to politics, politics should be quarantined as far away from it as possible unless the project is specifically and explicitly made to cover a political topic, since trouble brews in politics' wake that can damage or outright kill an otherwise perfectly functional thing that didn't need to die or become a source of stress due to unrelated IRL stuff.

Like, for example, Elon making twitter open source is a great thing for everyone regardless of ideology, but instead of celebrating, I see people diluting how good of a thing that could potentially be because of what people think of Elon. That kind of stuff drives me insane, from my perspective their political ideologies are suffocating them from realizing instantly that if he keeps his word, they can fork twitter and potentially make a "I hate Elon, I hate modern twitter" version of twitter, much like what Mastodon is doing, kinda.

A little bit of pragmatism goes a long way when it comes to software, and it's like pragmatism is the first thing to get chucked out the window when people feel strongly about a political topic. I've seen it in a not insignificant amount of situations and it bothers me immensely that when someone says "Hey let's laser focus on making something better and duke this out elsewhere" people take that as like, me trying to be centrist or something, when it's really me just going "Please cut that out, get your grievances out somewhere that isn't this project/game. I'm not saying to not have political opinions, I'm trying to say trim the fat around this thing that causes ire among people that could otherwise be working together or having fun together, it'd be nicer to follow a project that just is helpful to everyone or enjoyable to use without the added stresses of unrelated things."

I guess what I mean to say is, I'd like a place that enforces that people get rid of the "bloat" to put it in coding terms. I'm not asking for the support or condemnation of any ideology. I can do that elsewhere whenever I want to. I'm asking for a place that gives me a break, for the sake of the projects I enjoy, and my mental health.

... I just want to see "The Berlin Wall" come down that separates the [ Social Hubs ]:

Twitter, Facebook, Gab, TruthSocial, Mastodon and all the [ Social Hubs ] need to interface like Email so people can be "Cosmopolitans" (Citizens Of The World) not some damn captive in some damn walled garden.

I wish there was a website like twitter, where you have the freedom to say anything you want, EXCEPT political discussion was just straight banned, cold turkey, left and right wing, so people can focus on collaboration/promotion of neat projects first and foremost without being at each other's throats for 5 seconds,

The problem is that just about anything can be declared "political speech" these days.

Musk's buyout of Twitter might just be enough to convince me to use it. It was nothing but an echo chamber for the left prior to the buyout, and frankly, that's boring to read and really nauseating. Neutrality is very much welcomed.

Hahaha sorry but that's hilarious. Both sides always think it's against them. I'm on the "Left" and see absolutely masses of right wing bull. It's very easy to find too.

I am not on Twitter. But I think one problem already is, to divide the people in "left" and "right". Even more senseless here in Germany, where "right" and "right extreme" is often used as it would be the same.

The thing I miss is, that people listen to each other and then discuss things. But today it mostly is like identifiying the other as right or left.
If you are left, you must hate the right wing person or at least prove they are wrong.
If you are right, you must hate the left wing person or at least prove they are wrong.

And even a lot of people today seem to be not able to respect a person who is "on the other side". I personally wouldn't even identify in one of these left/right side.
I look what argument is sensefull to me, and oh wonder, sometimes I do more agree with the left side and sometimes with the right side.
That makes me perhaps absolutely incompatible with Twitter. Both sides there would hate me, as you must agree or you get the hate.


Last edited by einherjar on 26 April 2022 at 12:30 pm UTC

(I didn't read all postings, just chiming in.)

I just simply personally believe that when it comes to software projects that are unrelated to politics, politics should be quarantined as far away from it as possible unless the project is specifically and explicitly made to cover a political topic, since trouble brews in politics' wake that can damage or outright kill an otherwise perfectly functional thing that didn't need to die or become a source of stress due to unrelated IRL stuff.

This sounds good, but I deem it impossible. Inside Debian, there's been discussions if the Taiwanese flag should be part of the some country choosing dialogue. You can have trans or non-binary persons anywhere, and then people who like to use personal pronouns that those spoken to deem wrong. Have a weather forecast with coloured countries, what colour to give Crimea. The list goes on. There's no big space without politics.


Last edited by Eike on 26 April 2022 at 1:21 pm UTC