EDIT: I didn’t notice in the original post, the article is from 2023

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19707239

Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022 – and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network on which many of them rely is getting harder.

Policies aimed at curbing the deadly effects of climate change are accelerating, prompting a rise in what experts identify as organised resistance by opponents of climate reform.

Peter Gleick, a climate and water specialist with nearly 99,000 followers, announced on May 21 he would no longer post on the platform because it was amplifying racism and sexism.

While he is accustomed to “offensive, personal, ad hominem attacks, up to and including direct physical threats”, he told AFP, “in the past few months, since the takeover and changes at Twitter, the amount, vituperativeness, and intensity of abuse has skyrocketed”.

205 points

I have no clue why all these normal, non-racist non-political people still use twitter. It was bought for the obvious purpose of providing a safe space for conservatives, racists, incels, and other outcasts to society. Mastodon is a perfect replacement for it, and you can pick an instance that suits you. It isn’t owned by a mentally unstable billionaire!

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51 points
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I agree with this assessment for the most part but one side of me plays devil’s advocate on this:

I sort of came to realize in the end that it was possibly purchased to push all leftists off the platform, allowing Musk to compete with Google and Facebook in heavily manipulating and censoring discourse in American society (and let’s be clear, they did. Just because it was an attempt to help “the good guys in the DNC” by Google and Facebook doesn’t make it not an open and shut case of treasonous manipulation of discourse.

As an absolutely prolific Twitter user pre-2016, I was very quick to leave….but at the same time, I eventually came to the sad conclusion that Xitter (pronounced Shitter) actually does need leftist voices as long as it exists. IMO, it (and Google and Facebook) should be dissolved, open sourced, decentralized, and socialized for the crime of treason/undermining democracy.

We (people of the fediverse with a strong sense of integrity) basically fled to our own decentralized, open source platform where we have 1 millionth of the reach with our voices. Being around such a cesspool where astroturfers working for Progressive think tanks and their conservative buddies would gaslight me about the popularity of things like Single Payer or student loan reform…which was not great for my well-being…But let’s not pretend that leftists that remain on the platform are bad people for doing so. An echo chamber has a way of brainwashing people. So, conservatism would be even stronger had more of our brethren not stayed.

Just a small counterpoint. I strongly dislike conservatism and the conservative ethos of “fuck you, got mine”…but perhaps they were playing 4D chess with us a bit.

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-18 points
Removed by mod
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13 points
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Deleted by creator
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3 points

Made sense to me

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22 points

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Twitter hasn’t dropped below the critical mass of users necessary for the system to become useless. It’s still a major artery of media and social commerce, just one that’s been littered with landmines. Yes, its far more dangerous and difficult to navigate now, but its still better than posting into the uninhabited wilderness that is Bluesky or the exact same basket of shitty engagement posts that is Threads.

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18 points

Counterpoint: Twitter will continue to maintain a critical mass of users until enough people move somewhere else to make it irrelevant. Continuing to use it only serves to further credentialize the platform, making it even less likely that users will find a new home someplace else.

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10 points

Continuing to use it only serves to further credentialize the platform

The vast majority of users don’t care whether the platform is credentialized or not.

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5 points

Is it actually better than nothing though?

Either these are tolerant folks or someone we might be better off if they stayed on 4twitter.

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17 points

It’s still usable if you’re not on English side of Twitter.

For example, recent Indonesian political movement relied on Twitter for discussion and updates. Mastodon or any fediverse is simply too niche and most people don’t have money to fund local general instance. There were several local fedi instance (Mastodon and Lemmy), but all of them quickly dead for low donation.

Japanese-side is still alive (in positive manner) but people are making backup account on Bluesky and Japanese Misskey instances.

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9 points

The otherwise sensible people I know who are still on Twitter all say it’s because of a specific interest or group, and the community of people around it who are all on there as well. They all hate what it’s become but put up with it because nobody is sure where else to go.

There’s also a sense of FOMO when it comes to realtime news updates. Until government, news media, and personalities go somewhere and take all their followers with them, it will be hard to break away.

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2 points

Idk either. But it’s really easy to stay where you’re used to, rather than do the work to set something new up

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-10 points

Very true, but at the same time I feel that it’s a place where I won’t get censored just because google randomly thought my comment was offensive

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4 points

People get censored on Twitter all the time.

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104 points

Reality: you can stop fascism by deleting the app

Everyone: doesn’t

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-1 points

Oh, i didnt know this was like IT. i’ll tell my russians friends just to ignore putin’s regime

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27 points

If by ignore, you mean stop paying taxes and working in any capacity for government in one go, yes would work. The only fear is being singled out, if more than 0.5% of the people do it, army wont even have the guts to get tanks out, they will join.

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13 points

Touché

Venezuela has ~70% of the people against the regime, (nearly 90% counting the 5M that were not allowed to vote) and the needle isn’t even moving.

And in Russia being “singled out” is apparently a national tradition.

Sorry, I may be over pessimistic today.

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1 point

No. Dunno where did you take that 0.5% from, it’s not empirically confirmed by anything.

Like 20% if you want to see civil war. Like 40% if you want to see regime change.

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4 points

Pardon my ignorance. I may have a mild brain injury.

Could you perhaps rephrase?

I’m not sure if I understood what you said.

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7 points

In IT (the movie and, i presume, also in the book) ::: spoiler spoiler The kids realize that IT feeds on attention and that the only way to fight it is by ignoring it :::

Imo, shitter (X) is a cesspool as it is now, but I dont believe that leaving it to the hordes is a solution to anything. We need a better approach to deal with this people.

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55 points

Considering Meta is doubling down on disinformation, more people should go to Mastodon and Bsky over Threads or Twitter.

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22 points

Is blue sky really ok? Considering who started it…

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11 points

i don’t think jack funded it he was just an original board member; but he left the board a month or two ago.

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1 point

Yeah, it seems pretty good.

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2 points

I’d agree. For now at least it’s pretty good.

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Hell no, fuck Bluesky. There is no reason not to adopt ActivityPub when trying to build an open, federated Twitter alternative. Except for power and control over the platform, its core protocol and ecosystem. Screw these guys, use Mastodon or anything on the Fediverse.

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0 points

except they adopted atproto because it fixed issues with activitypub portability and sharing

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This is their stupid excuse. They could still implement ActiviyPub as a secondary federation protocol. (Bluesky <-> Bluesky via ATProto, Bluesky <-> Fediverse via ActivityPub). They decided against it. It’s an intentional choice, and they’re just making up excuses.

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55 points

We should as a community ensure Twitter\X lives forever…

If only as a place to keep certain social media users “entertained”

In all seriousness it does concern me how often I see such a wide variety of news agencies quote Twitter considering the amount of hate that goes on there

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24 points
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The irony of climate scientists ignoring a problem and waiting until it’s far to late to do something is honestly pretty funny…

At this point it’s wholly on you if you’re still using twitter.

You’d think smart people like science nerds would have left the Nazi bar ages ago.

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6 points

That first line is so spot on. Brightened up my day

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14 points

It’s because the news media industry as a whole has stuck with Twitter as their primary social media site. It’s kinda hilarious how much they seem to like it and how much time they spend there.

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11 points

That’s dangerous. Look at what Fox is doing, as an entertainment company, to US politics across the country.

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2 points

Disastrous, even

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7 points

It’s a containment site; has been for a while.

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3 points

Except the majority of mainstream news outlets use it as a source for 90% of their coverage.

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1 point
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This is why we need the SCP Foundation.

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4 points

Not what you intended, but:

scp /dev/zero root@x.com:/path/to/databases
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1 point

Your comment reminds me of that great tune by Pink Floyd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDDzR2zSgsM

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38 points

X needs to start getting banned by governments and official governmental channels need to be moving out.

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6 points

X is such a shitty social network, or at least its really disorganized, I get porn and gore in my home page without following people who share that kind of content, That doesn’t happen even in 4chan

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2 points

Wow 4chan really changed huh

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