Elon Musk purchases Twitter | Guess who's back? | Tactical Salt

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I honestly think that the people who hate Elon just as insufferable as the people who fangirl over him. I hope that this will inspire a new jadedness toward social media in general, and Twitter will just become like Facebook in that it is only used by boomers and will fade into irrelevancy. A new period of time will exist where people just go on Discord groups or something. Or maybe will go to the library and read a book, or actually engage with people outside through actual hobbies rather than political discourse. Also, watch all the leftists on Twitter flock to Mastodon and create an even bigger echo chamber that implodes on itself and every extremely online person.

i wish there was a middle ground

everything is either a boomer place or some neo-nazi degenerate haven for faggots and stupid people who just constantly lie and make things up. there's no place for just, regular interaction and places that are end up getting closed (like ruqqus)

i think the boomer stuff is pretty small but the lying pervert nazi propegandist shit is so mainstream. CNN, Twitter, discord, >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk, tumblr....like wtf
 

Deleted member 1930

I never much liked twitter either way. All this endless scroll bullshit is mind numbing at best.

like >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk, it is okay in an extremely small dose. like, >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk has always been gay, but if you stayed in focus places it was ok. like, if you stayed in places that appealed to you, it was ok. into guitars. stick around r/guitar, you'd probably be ok.


but then it started to seep into everywhere until it became a digital Reich
 

SolidStateSurvivor

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Journalists are already questioning/pushing the possibility of government intervention when it comes to regulating speech on social media. Elon Musk also made a Tweet mentioning this possiblity.

This article laments that "the U.S. lags far behind regions like Europe when it comes to digital rule-making." EU is bordering on dystopic levels of censorship already after all, I'm sure Americans aren't too keen on catching up to that. But to give some credit to the article, it does have some interesting perspectives on what Musk may do moving forward based on the financial intricacies of the deal. It's biased at times, but a decent read.

This article on the other hand is a dumpster fire of seething as an American journalist attempts to gaslight readers on the concept of free speech with a smug, condescending tone. Included is completely unrelated rants around some topical events regarding race, LGBTs, and a call for wealth redistribution. Overall, it's just another boot licking west coast social progressive backing corporate right's to restrict speech, all while fronting as a hip and anti-establishment type of person. To author Devin Coldewey, all I have to say is that if you don't like what Elon does with his private company, why don't you go make your own platform? Learn to code lul :PepsiDog:
 
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Funny enough, I was thinking of starting a twitter to do what amounts to monetizing book reports.

Can't wait to do 300 tweet thread about Evola's takes on Tantric sex and Jazz music (with links to my future 5 dollar-a-month Substack newsletter, of course).
 
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Andy Kaufman

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Allegedly, there's something odd happening to right wing accounts who're suddenly gaining 50k-100k followers overnight, getting their accounts reinstated or suddenly getting verified after getting declined several times for no good reason.
Tinfoil mode:
Twitter staff is trying to cover up something.
 
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CapnGreenGenes

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Allegedly, there's something odd happening to right wing accounts who're suddenly gaining 50k-100k followers overnight, getting their accounts reinstated or suddenly getting verified after getting declined several times for no good reason.
Tinfoil mode:
Twitter staff is trying to cover up something.
funny enough they gave me my twitter back, but they deleted EVERYTHING, scrubbed my profile and followers, fucking dweebs.
 
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Taleisin

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Orlando Smooth

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Tinfoil mode:
Twitter staff is trying to cover up something.
Is that really even tinfoil mode at this point? They banned the fucking president of the United States (who I can't stand and will not shill for, but still) while leaving up legit authoritarians and middle east terrorist leaders.

We have to ban mentions to Hunter's laptop because "it might be foreign misinformation" but we have to dox the libs of tiktok lady because "it might be foreign misinformation." Short of them literally saying in official corporate documentation that they intentionally and uniquely suppress the American right wing, it could not be more obviously that that's what they're doing.

I fucking hate people like MTG and the Qtards, think they're an absolute scourge on society, but banning them just proves their point that there's a high-level conspiracy against them. There's a reason that old school hate-fueled conspiracy theories died off when we had true free speech in society, while these new age ones continue to grow.
 
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Andy Kaufman

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Is that really even tinfoil mode at this point?
At this point, it still is. If Musky Boy actually finds evidence then conspiracy theorists were right... again!
I think it's likely but some nice hard evidence in gorm of mails or code traces would be super delicious
 
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InsufferableCynic

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I don't really like that Musk is buying twitter, and would prefer for it to just slowly die, for 2 main reasons:

1. Musk is basically a con artist. Virtually all of his major projects have either been outright, physically impossible lies (Starlink, Hyperloop, point-to-point rockets, solar-city, robotaxis that generate money, etc), completely overblown and underdelivered (Tesla self driving, reusable rockets, vegas loop, Tesla battery technology) or has just been rebranded products from other people (LG supplied batteries, etc). He also has plenty of vaporware that never came to anything despite being promised for release years ago (Cybertruck, Neuralink, Mars mission, Tesla Semi, that weird robot thing with the dancing mime). All of his enterprises are bleeding money and not profitable, with the exception of SpaceX which largely makes money by overcharging the US government for services, something which has angered many of the top people at NASA who see it as overpriced garbage. The only successful project he was tangentially involved with was PayPal, which fired him immediately after buying out his company (their competitor), before they were really successful, so he had nothing to do with their actual success. Given this track record, I feel like this Twitter purchase is more of the same, either a pure pump and dump scheme, or a network he will largely do nothing with and let stagnate while he uses it's net worth to prop up his other enterprises, keeping the scam going. Since he has a history of not exactly supporting free speech, I wouldn't get your hopes up.

2. Even if Musk did have good intentions and did actually deliver on the perfect "free speech" platform, and turned Twitter into an actual genuine free speech platform, it still suffers from all the same problems as every other platform. Replacing a liberal, left-wing dictatorship with a right-wing one doesn't solve the underlying problems. Even if you had a perfect dictator who was completely benevolent, they won't be around forever, and they still have to follow the law, meaning Twitter can be, at best, revitalised temporarily, until the next idiot takes hold and changes the policies again, or the US government sticks their grubby little hands all over it. On any platform, left or right, there's no such thing as "free speech", the closest you can get is an administrator who happens to tolerate your views enough to permit them, which could change at any moment.

Twitter needs to die, and we need to replace it with decentralised, federated solutions, like Pleroma, Mastodon, etc. People keep saying blockchain is web 3.0, but ActivityPub is the actual web 3.0, and once it starts to really take off, only then will we enter a new era free of censorship and where individual communities can exist again without fear of being shut down. Twitter becoming popular again with conservatives actually works against that goal, so I see it as a net negative - we are propping up the bad system instead of replacing it with the better system.
 
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Andy Kaufman

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I don't really like that Musk is buying twitter, and would prefer for it to just slowly die, for 2 main reasons:

1. Musk is basically a con artist. Virtually all of his major projects have either been outright, physically impossible lies (Starlink, Hyperloop, point-to-point rockets, solar-city, robotaxis that generate money, etc), completely overblown and underdelivered (Tesla self driving, reusable rockets, vegas loop, Tesla battery technology)
Aren't there already people using Teslas to go on road trips and sleep all the way through?
 
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I don't really like that Musk is buying twitter, and would prefer for it to just slowly die, for 2 main reasons:

1. Musk is basically a con artist. Virtually all of his major projects have either been outright, physically impossible lies (Starlink, Hyperloop, point-to-point rockets, solar-city, robotaxis that generate money, etc), completely overblown and underdelivered (Tesla self driving, reusable rockets, vegas loop, Tesla battery technology) or has just been rebranded products from other people (LG supplied batteries, etc). He also has plenty of vaporware that never came to anything despite being promised for release years ago (Cybertruck, Neuralink, Mars mission, Tesla Semi, that weird robot thing with the dancing mime). All of his enterprises are bleeding money and not profitable, with the exception of SpaceX which largely makes money by overcharging the US government for services, something which has angered many of the top people at NASA who see it as overpriced garbage. The only successful project he was tangentially involved with was PayPal, which fired him immediately after buying out his company (their competitor), before they were really successful, so he had nothing to do with their actual success. Given this track record, I feel like this Twitter purchase is more of the same, either a pure pump and dump scheme, or a network he will largely do nothing with and let stagnate while he uses it's net worth to prop up his other enterprises, keeping the scam going. Since he has a history of not exactly supporting free speech, I wouldn't get your hopes up.

2. Even if Musk did have good intentions and did actually deliver on the perfect "free speech" platform, and turned Twitter into an actual genuine free speech platform, it still suffers from all the same problems as every other platform. Replacing a liberal, left-wing dictatorship with a right-wing one doesn't solve the underlying problems. Even if you had a perfect dictator who was completely benevolent, they won't be around forever, and they still have to follow the law, meaning Twitter can be, at best, revitalised temporarily, until the next idiot takes hold and changes the policies again, or the US government sticks their grubby little hands all over it. On any platform, left or right, there's no such thing as "free speech", the closest you can get is an administrator who happens to tolerate your views enough to permit them, which could change at any moment.

Twitter needs to die, and we need to replace it with decentralised, federated solutions, like Pleroma, Mastodon, etc. People keep saying blockchain is web 3.0, but ActivityPub is the actual web 3.0, and once it starts to really take off, only then will we enter a new era free of censorship and where individual communities can exist again without fear of being shut down. Twitter becoming popular again with conservatives actually works against that goal, so I see it as a net negative - we are propping up the bad system instead of replacing it with the better system.

That fucking website is filled to the brim with disgusting people who are more degenerate than the ones on twitter and is a massive "left-wing" echo chamber.

Say what you will with musk but honestly, I believe it be best for the Twitter to stay around. I'm sorry people but Facebook, Twitter, and other social media websites are going to stay around whether you like it or not. Even if Twitter manages to disappear (which I made a post about on this thread here though mind the grammar), It won't take long for the next big social media platform to become new Twitter and soon there will be people crying for that site's downfall. It's completely ridiculous.

The internet is not really "centralized" if you take a step back from the rhetoric of those who claim that it is but really; it's not. There are tons of social media websites as we speak competing in the market that wishes to be big as Facebook or Twitter. The issue is that most of them fall short and wound-up becoming echo chambers themselves hurting their chances with potential partnership and revenues and plus it's bad enough we have news media going about telling people about "alternative" sites. This is why I have no faith with alternative sites such as bitchute, parler, or gab because it is clear where they stand and the majority of them have basically become echo-chambers where they can produce actual harmful content that will cause actual radicalization.

Believe me when I say this, I'm not a fan of censorship but however, I do believe in the notion that while yes, the right to freely express your thoughts is vital for free societies. It must be important that people have the ability to disagree and have genuine discussions without forcing one party to conform and in the case of social media; having its own platform play favorite and deliberate silence those who don't align with them which has been an ongoing issue since 2014 and later 2016. What the majority of people want really is actual transparency from the platforms they use on. Let's be real, none of the general public is going to dip their toes into the alternative sites you and I have mentioned they would rather use something that everyone else uses and that is most convenient for everyone sake. Even if that makes the internet seem "centralized"

I still have my hopes to see Twitter and soon other larger platforms to start getting rid of its Pro-censorship folks and rid itself from its interventionist traits in favor of transparency and the things I've mentioned aboce.

Aren't there already people using Teslas to go on road trips and sleep all the way through?

I went to check up on some statistic and articles on it, here.

 
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InsufferableCynic

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By Mastodon, I am more referring to the technology itself rather than the actual instance hosted on their website, but yes, it's full of weebs and degenerates. Niche software projects tend to attract those sorts of people for some reason

I see your point about Twitter, however I feel you may have somewhat misunderstood what I was saying in my previous post. If you're just comparing Twitter to a myriad of other sites (including the main Mastodon instance), yeah, it's the best of a bad lot and is likely not going anywhere for that reason.

My point is we need to leave the platform mentality altogether, so that there is no possibility of a new site with new censorship. It's basically the old web again - you host your own instance for you and your friends, and can then interact with all the other instances freely. Nobody can control what you can say, the most they can do is prevent your content appearing on their instance, which is purely a one-way operation. Even if a "liberal" instance decides to completely block post sharing from a "conservative" intance, if there are hundreds (or thousands) of instances, people can still freely share content from both of those instances with the others. It makes for a network where communities can largely curate themselves without affecting each other.

I understand there are hundreds of sites, but the reason it's considered "centralised" is because all the traffic and users largely flock to a handful of websites. A website with no traffic might as well not exist.

I agree about bitchute. It's largely filled with the rejects of Youtube who got banned (some for VERY good reasons, others not so much). Any "alternative" nerwork will always have this problem because it's basically only going to house the rejects. That said, I doubt anyone is preventing liberals from making accounts on sites like bitchute, they just choose not to. It's not censorship, it's actually part of the left-wing echo chamber - part of not associating with your enemy is not associating with their websites. I know conservatives can go the same thing, but in the current state of the internet, there seems to be a pretty big power imbalance, and so almost all of the censorship and echo-chambering happens on one side.

That said, I would say the biggest problem with my approach is there are still sneaky ways to accomplish censorship, depending on how the situation ends up. If enough people flock to a small number of instances, then those instances can effectively block the "bad ones" and it becomes functionally indistinguishable from a regular platform.


Aren't there already people using Teslas to go on road trips and sleep all the way through?

If they are, they really shouldn't be

Anyone who was hoping this would get Trump back is going to be disappointed
Truth Social is 100% guaranteed to go down in flames. Aparrently it violates the GNU AGPL, and I'm sure the commies at the FSF would love to take a shot at Trump.

But I kind of hope it dies anyway, because a "conservative focused" social network sounds about as cringe as a leftist social media.
 
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MorphedSnowman

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Say what you will with musk but honestly, I believe it be best for the Twitter to stay around. I'm sorry people but Facebook, Twitter, and other social media websites are going to stay around whether you like it or not. Even if Twitter manages to disappear (which I made a post about on this thread here though mind the grammar), It won't take long for the next big social media platform to become new Twitter and soon there will be people crying for that site's downfall. It's completely ridiculous.
Couldn't the same argument be made of ciggarets? It's like saying we shouldn't be against smoking since everyone is smoking and if we banned or discouraged smoking everyone would just do it illegally or something. As if it's a fact of life when ciggares usage per person wise went really down from 1980s to now. Sure, people still smoke, but generally you aren't forced to inhale it as much as before and the world is better for it.
The internet is not really "centralized" if you take a step back from the rhetoric of those who claim that it is but really; it's not. There are tons of social media websites as we speak competing in the market that wishes to be big as Facebook or Twitter. The issue is that most of them fall short and wound-up becoming echo chambers themselves hurting their chances with potential partnership and revenues and plus it's bad enough we have news media going about telling people about "alternative" sites.
This is a weirdly recent outlook on things. There were times where even during big social media centralization, we had new and upcoming social medias. If you didn't like myspace you go to facebook. If you don't like facebook you go to tumblr. If you don't like tumblr you go to vine or whatever. That's not really centralized when a serious competitor can just appear within less than 3 years and take your spot, is it? And back then you didn't really have these echo chambers like today since these services weren't run based on statistics. Lot of them didn't even have ads for few good years of their existence. Youtube was ad free for few years and there was no watchlist designed for you. You just checked what was popular in the world. What changed that was exactly the same thing as Musk is doing. Which is buying out competitors and making them go to fewer and fewer owners. We had instagram but it was bought up by facebook. If that didn't happen, I really doubt facebook would exist by now. Same story with whatsapp actually. And the idea that you somehow can be pto free speech while also making sure more and more is under your control is just plain stupid. It's an contradiction.
I still have my hopes to see Twitter and soon other larger platforms to start getting rid of its Pro-censorship folks and rid itself from its interventionist traits in favor of transparency and the things I've mentioned aboce.
These platforms creates these folks though, as outrage is how they make money. It's a consciously crafted mix of setting people up in certain ways to produce outrage in them, in hopes of gaining attention. As anger is easy to evoke, but also pretty cheap, and with it, earn profits. You by definition can't have a free speech twitter. You can have a free speech, non outrage dependent, microblog aggregator (although it being a microblog, it already sets itself out in the way of making sure the content will be as deep as a puddle), but the only way to have that is to be against the whole way these services make money. It would be less twitter and more like a streamlined RSS feed.
 
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I don't really like that Musk is buying twitter, and would prefer for it to just slowly die, for 2 main reasons:

1. Musk is basically a con artist. Virtually all of his major projects have either been outright, physically impossible lies (Starlink, Hyperloop, point-to-point rockets, solar-city, robotaxis that generate money, etc), completely overblown and underdelivered (Tesla self driving, reusable rockets, vegas loop, Tesla battery technology) or has just been rebranded products from other people (LG supplied batteries, etc). He also has plenty of vaporware that never came to anything despite being promised for release years ago (Cybertruck, Neuralink, Mars mission, Tesla Semi, that weird robot thing with the dancing mime). All of his enterprises are bleeding money and not profitable, with the exception of SpaceX which largely makes money by overcharging the US government for services, something which has angered many of the top people at NASA who see it as overpriced garbage. The only successful project he was tangentially involved with was PayPal, which fired him immediately after buying out his company (their competitor), before they were really successful, so he had nothing to do with their actual success. Given this track record, I feel like this Twitter purchase is more of the same, either a pure pump and dump scheme, or a network he will largely do nothing with and let stagnate while he uses it's net worth to prop up his other enterprises, keeping the scam going. Since he has a history of not exactly supporting free speech, I wouldn't get your hopes up.

2. Even if Musk did have good intentions and did actually deliver on the perfect "free speech" platform, and turned Twitter into an actual genuine free speech platform, it still suffers from all the same problems as every other platform. Replacing a liberal, left-wing dictatorship with a right-wing one doesn't solve the underlying problems. Even if you had a perfect dictator who was completely benevolent, they won't be around forever, and they still have to follow the law, meaning Twitter can be, at best, revitalised temporarily, until the next idiot takes hold and changes the policies again, or the US government sticks their grubby little hands all over it. On any platform, left or right, there's no such thing as "free speech", the closest you can get is an administrator who happens to tolerate your views enough to permit them, which could change at any moment.

Twitter needs to die, and we need to replace it with decentralised, federated solutions, like Pleroma, Mastodon, etc. People keep saying blockchain is web 3.0, but ActivityPub is the actual web 3.0, and once it starts to really take off, only then will we enter a new era free of censorship and where individual communities can exist again without fear of being shut down. Twitter becoming popular again with conservatives actually works against that goal, so I see it as a net negative - we are propping up the bad system instead of replacing it with the better system.
Everything said here is correct. Musk in a con artist and (for the most half) just makes money out of speculation and controversy. I would like to add that the kind of people who might be allowed on to the website are going to be nothing more than centre-right, civic nationalist types. Effectively the Trump audience. Just more unwinnable arguments over IDpol rather than any serious discussions about why the west (and the human race in general) is in such a severe decline. I saw this on Gab for the few days I had an account on it. One of the first things I remember seeing was a pro-Israel group. These people are a prime example of the kind of right-wingers who like to claim they are being oppressed but in reality have an economic space that will cater to them. A Musk owned twitter is very unlikely to give airtime to any serious dissidents against the elite.
 

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