Twitter C/D

I have a Substack but I don't have the app on my phone so I've never used the chat function, and the Notes thing doesn't seem particularly relevant to my life, either.

elon is the absolute worst and i hate twitter right now, and you absolutely do not have to hand anything at all to him please god, but reifying the ostensible neutrality of the nytimes and npr and saying things like "if you don't believe the ny times and can't watch a hollywood movie, you must be a deluded fundie trump nut", like in this real tweet re-tweeted by otherwise otm opinion guy jamelle bouie - that right there is obnoxious horseshit that should be treated with contempt imo.

A feature of information bubbles is people inside them think beliefs I’ll politely call esoteric are normal—“everyone” thinks it—and reinforce that fiction with each other.
More likely many of those rejecting news, movies, and the medical profession today did so 10 years ago too. pic.twitter.com/aoBhuL7csS

— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) April 4, 2023

tbf these people can't watch Hollywood movies because they are woke, not because they are suck

please pray for yale grads

poor people often have a set of unsavory beliefs that mostly come down to the trauma of being poor and trying to claw out some autonomy but open arrogance and contempt from everyone who isn't poor sure could be dialed back a notch or two

str8 fire beautiful asia song

The "can't watch hollywood films" but is such nonsense anyway, sure there's a cottage industry of complaining about wokeness in franchises but a) everyone goes to see them anyway and b) Hollywood absolutely churns out constant product tailored to this demographic. like c'mon Elon was creaming himself over top gun: maverick just recently.

A few months ago I would've mounted a half hearted defence of the NYTimes based on the idea that yeah sure they're mostly terrible but no paper that so consistently shows up the UK media for the absolute clowns they are can be all bad, but since then it's turned out that despite this they are still keen to import UK media's terfness, so fuck 'em.

legitimate grievances with elite institutions, a growing sense of mistrust and alienation, has been capitalized on by bad actors. people feel alienated from the political process and with good reason so they turn to demagogues who tell them it is the "woke" who are doing this. large banks, the federal government, legacy media institutions, and yale graduates generally should look in the mirror if they want to know why they aren't trusted. the contempt for authority we have now is not taking a coherent form -- again, bad actors are capitalizing on the sentiment -- but it's not like the new york times or whatever is just innocent and well meaning.

more than that, their interest is specifically class interest and specious fantasies driven by class anxiety aren't any less prevalent among relatively well-off people. plenty of bad-faith demagogues for democratic voters too, see centrist opinion columnists.

this is absolutely not an excuse for elon, i am just saying that it isn't helpful to see dumb rubes as the source of the country's woes rather than a symptom of them

why not both

oh yeah i agree with you xp

man, liberals going to bat for like the sanctity of npr or nytimes or whatever is almost more cringe than elon.

eh I don't know how much it has to do with "sanctity" of anything. Elon's not responding to any actual problems with the NYT and NPR — which are legion! — but to the bizarro world right-wing media notion of them as Soros puppets trumpeting the coming of New World Order or whatever is the lunatic flavor of the week. He's just trolling and it doesn't have anything to do with the real world, obviously, so responding to it as anything except another sign of what he's turning Twitter into is a mistake imo. I'm not bothered on behalf of the NYT or NPR, it's just another indicator of how rancid his intentions are.

I saw the NPR state media label. What happened with the NYT?

They lost their blue checkmark oh noes.

oh right lol

tipsy check upthread for a tweet calling the NY Times "the most robust news organization in the English speaking world" - there obv are ppl who care about the sanctity of these news orgs. conversely the poster you quote has made it clear they do NOT view Elon's action as "anything except another sign of what he's turning Twitter into".

liberals going to bat for like the sanctity of npr or nytimes or whatever is almost more cringe than elon

instead of 'liberals' how about we call them low-information leftists?

because they're not leftists...but maybe we don't need to have that convo on yet another thread

Well tbh I'm not sure that's an inaccurate description of the NYT depending on how you define "robust." Maybe the BBC is comparable? Hard to think of anyone else who can compete on sheer scale, almost nobody actually tries to cover the world journalistically.

But my problem as a journalist doesn't have to do with "don't trash the NYT and NPR," it has to do with why. The things Musk hates about legacy media aren't all of the things legacy media does badly, it's the times they actually do journalism well. He hates journalism. He hates the idea that his ideas and diktats about the world (and himself) can be challenged by facts and data. I just think it's important to keep the streams separate. He's not attacking the NYT and NPR for their real-world flaws, he's attacking them as avatars of an entire approach to data and information.

low info leftists believe... very different things lol

Well yes as I said no one is under the illusion that this is not the case, everyone itt knows what Musk is.

xpost

i'm going to bow out of this convo. i agree with everyone. but also it's the same deal of certain people not really caring where i'm coming from and wanting to be right more than anything. "the currency of otm." i'd suggest to some they might benefit from not listening to only themselves so much but that would be demonstrably foolish.

xp yes to daniel

I mean, I've worked in and around journalism for 30 years. Pretty much my life's work! I recognize its many flaws as a practice, both historically and contemporaneously. But I still think a free press is net plus, society-wise, and attacks on the free press from people like DeSantis or Musk are dangerous no matter how flawed the specific institutions they're attacking are. They don't give one single shit about leftie criticisms of centrist media, they just hate the free press full stop.

now doing all my social media posting in a https://wavelength.app/ group chat with just me and the ai bot.

Ew

jfc

Elon Musk, in a remarkable show of maturity, has removed the "w" from Twitter's logo outside their San Francisco HQ. The company now reads as "Titter" pic.twitter.com/0i914uEygX

— LeGate🤠 (@williamlegate) April 6, 2023

one of America's greatest minds

interesting

no elon

For a guy who has racked up so many recent Ls, it is crazy that he is just getting rid of the only W he had

— Matt McGillvray (he/him) (@MattMcGillvray) April 6, 2023

You took out the W cause the W ain’t in you

Is there any benefit to him for destroying twitter? I have never seen a CEO treat a brand so carelessly.

people would stop making fun of him on twitter if twitter didnt exist i guess

twitter is where comedy lives

Like the way he changed the verified system is still mystifying to me. He just made it impossible to sort out real tweets from prominent accounts from imposters, rendering the site less usable.

Just seems like a lunatic to me.

he believes a lot of very dumb things about twitter

He seems to believe in making it into a worthless asset.

thats certainly the result at least

I guess he thinks he is tapping into some kind of iconoclastic energy that reminds him of his early days at paypal.

And now that Substack has come out with its own Twitter-esque thing ("Substack Notes"), you can no longer embed tweets in Substack newsletters.

Wait till he finds out how he's spoken of here...

Oopsy

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/technology/twitter-lawyer-resigns-christian-dowell.html

I don't think Musk actually has or has ever had a plan for Twitter. But I also think that him degrading its value as a medium for independent news and information serves his purposes even if it's kind of by accident, or maybe instinct is a better word.

the impression i got when he did an all hands was that he held not just current leadership but the premise of twitter.com in total contempt. either that or he is literally slow-witted. those seemed like the only two possibilities.

theyre not exclusive options

how soon we forget the lessons of the last

https://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/

banning substack on twitter is lol for many reasons but my favorite is that bari weiss and matt taibi are in the top 25 most paid substack writers https://pressgazette.co.uk/newsletters/highest-earning-substacks/

It’s been shown that the algorithm was making posts about Ukraine less visible so there’s an argument Musk is not really concerned with profitability if he can help his financiers push their agendas. He probably gets financially compensated in other ways