Refuse to call it anything but the original Twitter, call it X, call it Twixter, or call it out for the Hellhole it is now, there’s no doubt the place is nothing like it was before Elon purchased it.
Those with the intelligence and empathy to have true concern have been trying and failing to decode Elon for some time. To be clear, that’s not a gematria decode - I said empathy. That task is near insurmountable as he is a human weather vane, impossible to predict with a rapid storm front that changes its nature several times a second. Whether by accident or design policy changes regarding the operation of our favorite Hellhole always seem to end up favoring those that seek to use it for propagation of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda containing those previous two, and grifters.
I shared a lot of the story of bot invasion yesterday. The part that was most disturbing is that in the old Twitter days you would receive a notification when any other account followed you. A prime feature of functional social media is the attempt to bring together people that think alike, to form groups of shared interests. Despite a previous lack of contact defined by geographic barriers. The chance for me to clearly see that Elfreda, the Sylvan Goddess, followed me, wants to CamChat and give me the easy opportunity to say, “oh yeah baby, I’d tap that!”, click on the handy follow back button at the top and start the good times rolling.
What attention seekers like Musk fail to realize is that one who truly has empathy and gives a damn about what’s going on around them realize that empathy also includes caring not just about the effects on yourself, but the possible outcomes of poor decisions by those in charge. Since I never received notification that Elfreda followed me, somehow she (or rather, it) was allowed to bypass a normal, sensible process and just magically follow me.
Sure, I’m smart enough to recognize that the only post this account has put up since creation of the account in September 2023 is this one. And I’m smart enough to recognize the red flags and soft block of hard block it. Even without the experience of having to waste my time on five dozen of similar accounts in recent history I’d know that nothing good would come about from engaging with what is…to me…an obviously fake and unserious account. But never let your Dunning-Kruger stop you from realizing that it can and does affect other people without the IQ to recognize the pattern or the life experiences to have them take pause and get a little dose of healthy skepticism.
Elon is a perfect example of how powerful money is, where it gets to a point of having money instead of being right is the top priority. The money itself isn’t that important. It’s how that money gets him what he really wants - the attention. Even colossally bad financial decisions about his fluctuating net worth is still attention.
In the unlikely event that top tier corporations return to Twitter because the policy of allowing porn bots to follow people magically proves the Hellhole is good for business, I’ll be the first to publicly acknowledge how wrong I was about Musk. In the meantime I expect a lot more head shaking, eye rolling a WTFing, as his pet projects are all dreams that are scientifically viable, but economically horrendously difficult to implement.
The two pieces of media that come to mind are Mel Brooks, The History of the World Part I and a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode. In History, Brooks as King Louis XVI makes colossally bad decisions and shrugs them off with a simple, “It’s good to be king!” Totally unconcerned about the downtrodden and impoverished people he rules over. The Simpsons and Springfield are attacked by all the giant advertisements and the solution was to just not look. Unfortunately, although we will never get over the colossal failures of the Hellhole’s creator and keep looking like deer stuck in the headlights, also not looking at his ads isn’t a fix since he’ll just create alternative to main stream advertising. Like porn bots that magically appear.
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