Quitting Twitter
After ten years on Twitter, I am deleting my account. When I first joined the platform, it was a tool for making connections between people in my hometown and our sister city in Italy. It was an accessory to other networking tools like a website and a LinkedIn account. At that time it wasn’t political, at least to me. I never imagined a deranged president using it to make edicts or fire public servants disloyal to him. I didn’t realize that global bad actors would weaponize it.
I made some great friends on Twitter even though I will probably never see them face to face. With the emergence of Trump, it went from a public plaza to a battleground. Trolls, bots and some very nasty people began to litter the Twitter landscape. The management of Twitter acknowledged some of its problems and took steps to correct them. Banning Trump was a pivotal moment and, for a while, Twitter seemed a less toxic place.
I have no idea why Elon Musk, with some Saudi backing, would buy Twitter and promptly destroy it. He is an asshole but not an idiot. Whatever he has in mind, I want no part of it. Some say we must stay and fight but I think that is folly. It’s Musk’s playground and not a level playing field. If you’re on Twitter you are an Elon Musk asset. He owns your eyeballs and everything you share on Twitter.
I joined Democratic Underground over twenty years ago, long before Twitter came to dominate social media. To me it was the perfect forum with many great contributors on many topics. Even before I joined as a member, I submitted articles and was elated when they were published. DU had some very gifted contributors, many of whom went on to be widely followed bloggers.
DU has always been a comfortable place, one I would turn to for advice and support. I vividly remember the horror of the 2016 election night attack that took DU down for several days. It was a surreal harbinger of what the next four years would bring. I took it very personally.
With the advent of Twitter, too many DU posts were just regurgitated links to Twitter threads. My DU posts became very infrequent. Although DU was my favorite source of information and advice, it became less interactive for me. I still use DU as a news aggregator. It’s often out ahead of Twitter when a big story breaks.
With Twitter out of my life, I hope to be a more active member of Democratic Underground. Hopefully more here on DU will kick the Twitter habit and we will see fewer links to that now highly unreliable platform.
= new reply since forum marked as read
An I agree that we have way too many Tweet-posts here on DU. I think it's a lazy way of creating a post, when almost always it's possible to click through to the original source of the news story.
More DUers need to learn how to do that - click through to the original story and post that rather than the tweet of the story.
an account since 2010 but did not post very often - just sent stuff to my daughter when she had an account.
I MISS Twitter so much. I love the ability to curate what I see and who I follow. I'm glad some DUers are still posting Twitter links so I can live vicariously through their accounts
I guess it's only as unreliable as the people you follow and like all social media it makes sense to be discerning and fact check as needed. I mean I've seen some pretty unreliable stuff posted on DU, it just comes with the territory.
Their algorithm(s) find out what you like and feed you more.
Their goal is to own your eyeballs and your time. (translation: your life)
DU doesn't use an algorithm to decide what so send your way. It's PEOPLE, damn good ones.
You have chosen wisely.
re your comment about some Saudi backing, Alwaleed Bin Talal is the 2nd biggest investor, with Larry Ellison 3rd. Just sayin', cuz in past years Bin Talal has been the 2nd biggest shareholder of Fox News, too.
Might as well know the individual investors that Musk has pitched (thousands of institutional investors are on board, too).
https://slate.com/technology/2022/05/elon-musks-twitter-investors-a-guide-to-whos-who.html
