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It's pandemonium again on twitter .
A tweet by musk about advertising got 70k likes in 10 minutes. To put this in perspective, a tweet he made yesterday about "small talk" got 70k but in an hour.
It's amazing how much people care about advertising.
My positions are: I don't think there is anything the left can do about the Musk threat, which is why I am optimistic. The left had 7 years to go after Trump and largely failed to stop him . https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/11/03/the-regimes-response-to-the-musk-threat-why-im-optimistic/
Second, I think people are over-estimating the implication as far as the government's response is concerned, but underestimating the social impact. I think this is a bigger deal than even the Russian invasion of Ukraine in terms of overall impact on society. As a force of sentiment , musk has raised conservative's odds by 10% or more.
I honestly don't think that Musk owning Twitter is the big deal that both sides of the political spectrum are making it out to be. Only 23% of American adults use twitter (Linkedin is more popular), and "use" is defined fairly loosely—I think it was whether you logged into your account within the past three months, but that would include people like me who have accounts and look at it when someone links to a tweet, but I don't even have the app installed on my phone and I've never tweeted once. It also ignores the fact that the vast majority of Tweets are about sports, entertainment, business promotion, and other things that have very little to do with the public political discourse. People make a big deal about it because it's popular in the DC political and journalist world, which often confuses itself with the real world.
And even then, it's hard to see what major changes Musk could make that would have any effect on anything. As much as people liked to rag on Twitter for having a left-wing bias, almost every right-leaning politician and journalist, including controversial figures like Lauren Boebert and MTG, had a coveted Blue-Check account (though MTG was banned for a while), and reports of outright censorship or prominent bannings were rare enough that they were newsworthy when they occurred. Was this unfair to conservatives? Probably, but it's not like you can't express conservative opinions on Twitter without the ban hammer coming down. The censorship was limited to a few specific cases and even then I doubt that it really changed anything. Does anyone really believe that a few more Tweets about election fraud would have made a difference in the final result? Or that various COVID misinformation would have altered the public consciousness if some doctor you never hear of was allowed to Tweet about it? Is there anyone who was completely unaware of the content of the COVID "misinformation" that was being censored but who would have seen it on Twitter and believed it had it been allowed? I'm not trying to defend Twitter here, but even if you find speech restrictions deplorable it doesn't lead to the necessary conclusion that if the speech would have been allowed it would have significantly influenced anything.
Linkedin didn't burn a dozen countries where its user base was under 5%... Linkedin didn't make one of its random power-users the most powerful man in human history.
Twitter is special... a Guttenberg level weapon of geostrategic disruption
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Perhaps it's a case of the observer changing the experiment through the sheer act of observation?
I too don't think of this as a big deal. If things go well, Twitter will get better, only to be unseated by another platform within the next decade. If things go badly, Twitter turns into zombified wasteland or folds completely--and nothing of value will be lost.
But because Twitter is the terra firma of the Culture War, people are willing to give up their lives over VR hamburger hills, as if the platform itself was a low-res, text/image-based alpha version of the Metaverse. Put differently, all those emotions that twitter evokes, whether it's anger or jealousy or surprise actually help turn it into an almost physical presence. Some have suggested Twitter and other social media sites be turned into public utilities because it feels that real.
Musk entering the picture threatens the existence of the very soil upon which the Culture War is waged. That makes all the tribes nervous--any shuffling of rules will break an uneasy equilibrium and who knows who will end up on top. Or, worst case scenario, MuskTheGod destroys Twitter before there's a suitable replacement and culture warriors scatter to the four corners of the Earth. That's bad because each warrior's energy level depends on the size and complexity of the mob around they/them, which means that The Scattering would turns each one of them into merely a shadow of their former selves.
I can imagine some old SJW or angry /pol/itic, twenty years from now, telling their grand kid something like, "Them flamewars ain't what they used to be...."
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It isn't the number of Americans so much as which Americans use it. All politicians and journalists rely heavily on it, as do major corporations and celebrities, and most of these use it as their primary form of one-to-many and many-to-many communication.
Of course that's exactly Twitter's dilemma from a monetization perspective. It's incredibly influential, but it doesn't have the raw numbers to monetize to a degree commensurate with its influence.
Seems like charging to the influential to retain their influence is the best of a bunch of bad options then. Probably the $8 needs to quickly become an $800 without the frog leaping.
Providing enterprise support for bigcorps to use Twitter for press releases might be a worthwhile play but it would increase rather than decrease censorship because it would be used to keep brand images clean.
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The Texas nationalist campaign chief told me he blamed twitter censorship for not being able to use political power to effectively influence the state Republican Party the same way as other grassroots conservative groups(and the Texas nationalists have plenty of things they want beyond just a secession referendum). I don’t find this totally implausible, but it’s worth noting that they’ve accomplished some of it through primary challenges anyways.
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Twitter has about 78 million US users. Let's assume they are split politically. I think Trump being unbanned plus Elon's ownership boosting morale among conservatives could make a meaningful difference of turnout on the margins for close elections. Not just morale but also coordinating activism. If undecided voters on Twitter see a a strong anti-left bias, this may influence how they vote.
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