I've been a long-time Twitter user. I don't hate Elon, so when he bought it I was cautiously optimistic.
I deactivated last week. The platform is bad and getting worse. It's scammy and spammy. Everything is designed around garbage engagement, so that the X team can brag about how good the product is doing.
I follow a couple of writers on X through Nitter on a desktop browser. These writers inevitably draw bot comments whenever they touch on something relevant to some or another powerful country’s politics. For me, it’s easy to verify that these commentators (who often have convincing-sounding fake names and photos) are bots by simply ctrl-clicking on the commenters’ usernames and, in the tab that immediately opens, seeing at a glance that they post weird single-issue material at an unusually sporadic pace, and often in tellingly flawed English.
Do I suspect correctly that in the way most people consume X, though the official website or an app, this is not so transparent? Whether because opening new views is so slow on a phone screen, or because the official interfaces probably intersperse content with advertisements and other visual crap? I don’t think state actors would be so active in trying to manipulate discourse if the platform hadn’t degraded to a point where their activity isn’t obvious to most users.
“Bots” is a cover term for both purely automated scripts, and for human posters who are using some kind of tools to post more efficiently in order to manipulate discourse.
In this case, it’s obvious that a lot of Russian state-actor employees, for instance, are not passing their writing through an LLM, but rather are just quickly vomiting out a comment in their imperfect English. Exposés of Russian troll factories show that a lot of these employees are young university-educated people who only want the money, and don’t have strong feelings for the propaganda they are posting, so they half-arse it.
When I left about a year ago the whole feed was entirely just bot slop from verified accounts. It was impossible to tune or subscribe your way in to a good feed. I imagine it's so much worse now with all the AI generated content.
Only last week is shocking to me. People were saying this about twitter for like 10+ years as soon as it was commercialized and was no longer just user content.
Words have meaning. He said he does not hate him. That does not mean he likes him. Hate is a very strong emotion. Dislike is a much less stronger emotion. That is not all the same.
(I also don't hate Elon, but I still don't like him or consider doing buisness with him in any way)
USAID was a highly effective and efficient operation. Musk dismembered it, leading to untold misery, death, and the spread of infectious diseases. I think this is reason enough to hate Musk.
Also, keep in mind that what Musk did was a violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution, so he simultaneously killed a program which saved lives while he also started the U.S. on the road to authoritarianism.
The race to the highest body count looks like Elon in first, RFK jr. second, and Stephen Miller a distant third but looking like he'll finish strong once the camps are fully operating.
I would argue without Musk and his Twitter/richest man of the world power, Trump would have never been elected in the first place, which would have prevented this and a lot of other bad things. Still, I don't hate him. (Hate is not a condition I think is healthy or constructive or something I should explain myself not feeling it)
An "administration" doesn't add debt - Congress does. Power of the purse strings, no?
I'm not sure what you mean by "this administration". Are you including DJT's first term?
Regardless, here are the numbers per Investopedia:
"Based on total dollar amounts, Joe Biden contributed the most to the national debt, adding $8.5 trillion during his presidency, followed by Donald Trump ($7.8 trillion in his first term) and Barack Obama ($7.7 trillion during his two terms)."
DJT's first term had the excuse of the COVID pandemic. Other than the final year when that was an issue, his spending was reasonable. 0'Biden on the other hand, had no such excuse for his spending binge, which was consistent across his (thankfully few) four years in office.
The "talk of lowering debt" is necessary, since right now we're spending 25% of federal revenue (about $1 trillion) paying the interest on our current massive national debt.
The hope is that a supercharged US economy can raise revenues enough to ease the pain of paying down the national debt that's largely been accumulated since 2000. It must be done to avoid the inevitable consequences.
It is misremembering to frame their actions as recommendations, when they took action themselves, acted first, and asked for permission later. There were infamous public displays of being given carte blanche on the spot after employees told them they didn't have just that. They put metaphorical "heads on pikes" so that they wouldn't have to face questions again outside of court.
Yeah, if it weren't for USAID then the CIA wouldn't have had any cover for smuggling those weapons and would have just given up.
The argument is like saying "criminals used this bank to transfer stolen money so the bank is bad and I'm glad they were shut down." USAID has done far more good than the harm they were exploited to enable.
Not sure if this is intended to be critical or supportive. A lot of Americans supported these types of efforts to oppose the Soviet Union. There’s a Tom Hanks movie about it, for example.
Because they were lied to by American mass media that presented mujahedeen as freedom fighters. When 9/11 happened Americans suddenly found themselves on the receiving end and stopped being supportive of Islamic extremists.
And a vaccination programme was used as a front when searching for Bin Ladin. That doesn’t mean that vaccine programs are bad. Anything can be used as a front
I mean his personal lack of ethics, bigotries, greed, and ignorance is what directly made twitter what it is today. Maybe you should dislike him and hold him in low opinion.
It’s wild to complain about liberals’ hypocrisy of suppressing speech while defending Elon of all people, the most prominent “free speech absolutist” hypocrite there is.
I am not a republican. I am not a democrat. People who disagree with me aren't silent. I just graduated college and there they made sure people like me were silent. Reddit is similar. Most of western Europe, too.
Sorry bud, but you’re not getting the benefit of the doubt while defending reprehensible actions by Republican leaders that are plainly obvious to anyone who watched the event
I don't know anything about you and I understand the desire to not dox yourself. However, just a friendly tip, the way you are talking about your identity and how it has led to persecution against you while simultaneously avoiding giving actual details about your identity or how you have been persecuted comes off as untrustworthy. People can tell you're hiding something and many will jump to the conclusion that is because the response here would be even worse if you were more transparent.
"Similar" is not same. I watched the videos. There are ones where Warren does a "ramp" motion, AOC is just waving, etc. If you only look at freeze frames, you can claim whatever you want, but a stiff-armed Nazi salute is a specific motion of the arm, not a freeze frame.
If he wanted to do one, he would. Additionally, there are right wing groups that use the gesture. This just isn't a case of that. We need to learn to differentiate.
Musk definitely did several nazi salutes. Even did it with flourish like the hitler videos. Pretending otherwise makes you look like a sympathizer or a fool. Sorry.
I think its entirely reasonable that an algorithm shows you things that you engaged with. It would be weird if it didn't promoted stuff I didn't engage w/.
garbage engagement are posts so obviously wrong/provoking/you name it that you must exercise supreme self control to not engage with the content. And for some people it is quite difficult to do so algorithm thinks that, hey this is trending so might be i should show this to more people. So this garbage turns up on your stream. I bean dealing with this by straight up blocking such accounts, but this is loosing battle in the sea of bots :)
A better term might be antagonism. X seemed to switch to a system of rewarding views as a method of engagement far above all else, which led to people (generally and deliberately) ramping up the extremeness of their hot takes in a bid to get as much attention as possible.
A parallel term is "hate click", where there's a headline that's so stupid or off that you click it just to see what the hell they were talking about.
An example of this vile genre was someone tweeting about how:
"Teachers make plenty of money, and I think they should provide school supplies to their students out of their own pocket instead of making hard-working parents pay for them."
It was a message _designed_ to get people to yell at them, and for all of that, it wasn't any of the really hot-button stuff around politics, race, or any of the other divisive things that drive antagonistic engagement.
Twitter could have (and previously did) reward all sorts of other types of engagement, but the shift to rewarding divisiveness was just at another level.
I deactivated last week. The platform is bad and getting worse. It's scammy and spammy. Everything is designed around garbage engagement, so that the X team can brag about how good the product is doing.