<
https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit-elon-musk-s-x>
"If you are still posting on X, you should stop today. Quitting the site
yesterday would have been better, but doing it today is better than doing it
tomorrow.
The moral and political case for quitting X is so obvious that it scarcely
bears repeating, but I’ll briefly recap it anyway. The guy who owns X—the
person to whom you are personally donating if you pay for a blue checkmark—is
Elon Musk, an out and out white supremacist who uses X to spread Nazi ideas
like Great Replacement theory. He is a major backer, in both money and
propaganda, of the global far right. During his brief tenure inside Trump’s
Administration, he spearheaded the destruction of USAID, which, according to
recent estimates, may result in 14 million deaths between 2025 and 2030.
X is the platform this particular mass murderer uses to seed his most poisonous
ideas. A couple of months ago, he used the platform to egg on the Belfast
pogrom. Those who continue to post on X—in particular those X users who are not
racist psychopaths—are enhancing the site’s usefulness to him as a propaganda
tool by drawing more eyes to the platform and making it look like an
ideologically diverse “marketplace of ideas” instead of what it is: a delivery
vehicle for bringing fascism into the mainstream of global politics. Oh, and
perhaps the Internet’s leading destination for those in search of child sexual
abuse material.
Some non-fascist X users have acknowledged all of this and argued that,
nonetheless, progressives must remain on the platform to fight the propaganda
machine from within. I think that represents a fundamental misunderstanding of
how the platform operates. The token Democrat on
Fox News (these days, the
main one is Jessica Tarlov) is not there to undermine the network’s political
objectives. She’s there as a useful foil and to make
Fox News appear
(marginally) more credible as a balanced debate platform. Similarly, prominent
progressives on X are reinforcing the network effects that give the site its
power. Consider this: Musk’s meddling in the site’s algorithm to suppress
certain kinds of posts and elevate others is well documented. So if your
anti-fascist posts on X are still getting views, it’s either because these
posts are so toothless as to escape Musk’s notice, or because they are in fact
useful to him."
Via Brad Koehn and Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
