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”.
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!
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.
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.
The vast majority of users don’t care whether the platform is credentialized or not.
Idk either. But it’s really easy to stay where you’re used to, rather than do the work to set something new up
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.
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
People get censored on Twitter all the time.
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.