Twitter was a more equitable place when it was brand safe for pharmaceutical companies, and when people could publicly debase themselves and denounce their acquaintences without fear of mockery for aligning to absurd official narratives.
The reasoning appears to be something along the lines of, if you aren't getting your news and commentary from former spies and retired secret policemen, how can you be sure you are not being brainwashed? If you can't believe what our elected representatives tell you in their own words from their own twitter accounts, what else is there to believe? The preponderance of evidence and every recent study shows that your experiences of privilege and problematic beliefs have always been the root cause of human suffering, and unless you awaken to the new reality that you are individually insignificant and your very existence is a burden on the majority of the rest of humanity - and to the existence of the planet itself - not only you are among the Left Behind, but we will make sure your friends, employers, and acquaintences are made afraid to even know your name.
The irony of how these Huxlian "trust and safety teams," suppressed content is that they did it to persuade us that the rest of their nonsense was real. The Internet as a coherent thing hasn't existed since about 2018, it's just another paradigmatic hegemon, which, too, shall pass. It's more probable we weren't all meant to know each other or see each other, because it implies a zero sum power struggle in a false captivity, which trivializes and ignores the infinite vastness of the planet and life on it. Maybe the path to enlightenment really does involve taking more pictures of your butt, however, I think I'm ready to go all in on betting against that.
Social media is dead. The only thing left to do is figure out how to get rid of the smell.
Elon killing the Blue Check was extremely funny, mostly because it went from an indicator of notability to an indicator that a person is going to talk about crypto scams or the Jewish Question.
I too found the total 180° on who was complaining about 'bluechecks' quite amusing, especially when complete sentences match up.
I may just be experiencing frequency bias though, as I've long been amused/annoyed by words and phrases quickly coming to mean radically different things.
Censorship on the platforms changed from moderation to a kind of gaslighting (as per the twitter files), cloud services consolidated their control over email as a medium, the web is almost fully intermediated by google, akamai, and cloudflare.
There is no "internet," it's just some propaganda outlets attached to the surveillance devices you have to keep in your home to participate in the economy. It is no longer a popular elsewhere, 2018 marked the inflection point or epoch of the internet becoming just another homogenized organ of the leviathan, not to connect people, but to atomize them, imo. It is a walled garden that is completely surveiled.
I'd speculate that the majority of people who use the internet now are young enough to have almost never lived without it, and it forms the substrate of their ontology, instead of being just a thing that is separate from real life.
They have no sense of it being an objective fantasy realm.
I honestly can’t tell whether you think Twitter now, under Elon, is now less or more moderated than before, whether you are on the left or right of current political thought (or somewhere else entirely), or whether you consider unmoderated communication to be a good or bad thing (but I’m pretty sure it’s one of those).
I honestly can’t tell you why almost any of that is pertinent to the conversation at hand.
Why does it matter whether he has shackled himself to one side of a political binary, or cares for the happenings of a singular website and its owner?
As for moderation, I believe they were lamenting the corporatization of the Internet and how it has become a hotbed for controlling the populace, rather than connecting the populace. Which would presumably fall under a preference for unmoderated communication.
The US left took those Trump-Russia files as gospel, even though it turned out that the whole thing was most probably a set-up.
As such, the same US left now saying that one shouldn't take those Twitter files seriously is quite disingenuous, if anything, the Twitter files seem more real than any of that Trump-Russia fiasco.
The Trump Russia files were exposed as a 'work in progress' investigation from a former spy that wasn't supposed to be leaked yet. Stuff he was still researching. If you think the "US left" took them as "gospel", you may be consuming too much propaganda. Nobody thinks the Twitter files were fake, they just didn't reveal anything as damning as claimed. Is it surprising that the president's team asked them to remove (illegal) stolen pictures of his son's dick? Seems expected and reasonable.
There should be some kind of Litmus test to see how a platform is moderated. You could use it to find where in the political spectrum the moderation team is to see if the platform suits you.
I propose, for example, "equating abortion to murder", "misgendering someone", "calling someone the f-word", "saying that f-words are molesters", etc.
Most of the big platforms (such as Twitter or Meta) are just in the middle. Twitter before Musk moved one point to the left, making misgenderisation a bannable offence, but I think Musk undid that. As a data point I have had comments flagged for doing the first one here, so you can tell where this community stands.
I have absolutely no faith in changes made by Musk, but I have to say I still remember the days when the platforms, instead of silencing everybody by default, trusted you to make a judicious use of the block button, like a grown-up would.
It all started back in late 2016 (guess why), I'd say that by 2018-2019 the momentum was already strong enough for the general population to also get hold of it.
It all culminated in the summer or 2020 (for the Anglo- and Anglo-influenced world, at least), but, hopefully, I'd say that right now we're in the middle of a vibe shift. Evidence number one is the launch of Threads itself, which feels like the launch of a dead carcass out in the sea.
All this to say that the OP is correct, social media is dead.
The reasoning appears to be something along the lines of, if you aren't getting your news and commentary from former spies and retired secret policemen, how can you be sure you are not being brainwashed? If you can't believe what our elected representatives tell you in their own words from their own twitter accounts, what else is there to believe? The preponderance of evidence and every recent study shows that your experiences of privilege and problematic beliefs have always been the root cause of human suffering, and unless you awaken to the new reality that you are individually insignificant and your very existence is a burden on the majority of the rest of humanity - and to the existence of the planet itself - not only you are among the Left Behind, but we will make sure your friends, employers, and acquaintences are made afraid to even know your name.
The irony of how these Huxlian "trust and safety teams," suppressed content is that they did it to persuade us that the rest of their nonsense was real. The Internet as a coherent thing hasn't existed since about 2018, it's just another paradigmatic hegemon, which, too, shall pass. It's more probable we weren't all meant to know each other or see each other, because it implies a zero sum power struggle in a false captivity, which trivializes and ignores the infinite vastness of the planet and life on it. Maybe the path to enlightenment really does involve taking more pictures of your butt, however, I think I'm ready to go all in on betting against that.
Social media is dead. The only thing left to do is figure out how to get rid of the smell.