Twitter as sunlight
Don’t underestimate the damage done by Elon’s takeover:
Elon decimated the teams primarily responsible for keeping Twitter free of election misinformation, potentially hobbling the company’s capabilities four days before Tuesday’s election.
*Picture election malfeasance without Twitter. Last night, Alex Wagner covered it with the seriousness this change deserves. Although brief, she pointed to a past experience of a polling location in the last election wherein 1) voters in long lines reported on Twitter that there wasn’t enough power cables for the voting machines, 2) the report BY THE PUBLIC got the attention of the NAACP who pushed the right people to address it and requested that the polls STAY OPEN an extra 3 hours, which was APPROVED and 3) messaged out TO THE PUBLIC immediately.Just one example. We won’t learn about voters being intimidated even 10％ as much.
*Picture JAN 6 without Twitter. Many crowdsourcing teams started on Twitter to identify the insurrectionists, posting photos of people breaking into the capitol or in the crowd to piece together identifying information about the criminals who actually broke the law that day.
*Picture COVID under Trump without Twitter. On Twitter, Dr Eric Feigl Ding reported many details about seriousness of COVID in China before it hit the US and about subsequent waves long before the CDC was reporting them on TV.
*Picture police shootings without Twitter.
*Picture this one: the mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, said he had no idea President Trump had planned to send (200) federal officers to his city until he read about it on Twitter…
*What we will have instead.: The new feature could hypothetically allow users to impersonate public officials or politicians and disseminate false news as votes roll in. “That’s exactly the problem,” said the Twitter employee who remained with the company, adding that currently “Elon literally has no plans to stop that.”
*Replacements won’t have critical mass in time to make a difference. I expect DU to be flooded with new users but nothing has the speedy stream and critical mass of Twitter. Other social Twitter-like forums may get a lot of new traffic but probably won’t be able to suddenly ramp up (their human infrastructure at least) fast enough.
Not only 83 million Americans but 63 million Japanese and 24 million Indians.
= new reply since forum marked as read
building our follower counts with people we have vetted and we knew we could trust. We not only discussed politics, some of our followers are what I consider friends, I know I'm not alone.
I have worked for years to gather a group that I enjoyed and could trust, and in the matter of a few days, I have lost thousands of followers. People I have chatted with every few days for years and years.
They have succeeded in ruining the best news source on the internet in a couple days.(a source, often hours sometimes days ahead of MSNBC, CNN, etc.)
Lostnfound gave me goose bumps, I can't imagine any of those events without Twitter. This could also be at least part of why they have done this, I hadn't thought about it from that angle.Terrifying.
