| Unpopular take: Twitter is like it always was. Unhinged leftists everywhere you look. Calls to erase Israel from people with Palestine and Trans flags in bio with these posts getting hundred thousand likes. The only difference now is that there are also unhinged right wingers (simply as a function of them not getting banned anymore). I like it, it's entertaining. It reminds me of the old internet days. Wild west full of propaganda, but from all sides, not just the pre-approved western liberal one. I don't want people like Tucker or Candace or Nick banned, I want to laugh at their nutty takes. I want to laugh at "boomers" getting one-shotted by all the fake AI videos. I want to laugh at conspiracy theories about 6 fingers and coffee not being spilled. I get the argument that weak minded parts of the population may take these things seriously, but the answer shouldn't be just "let's crack down and clean up everything unsightly", as that a) doesn't work in the long run, b) presents space for conformity based social contagions to run wild and c) goes against the concept of true democracy (which I like). |
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| ▲ | DrScientist an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > c) goes against the concept of true democracy (which I like You mean one person, one vote. Or in the case of Twitter/X - one person one voice/account. Don't spaces like these become dominated by fanatics or money, or fanatics with money? All trying to manufacture consent? Unregulated != democratic Just like unregulated != free market [1] Sure it's difficult to get the balance right - but a balance is required. [1] As the first step of anybody competing in an unregulated market is to fix the market so they don't have to compete - create a cartel, monopoly, confusopoly ( deny information required for the market to work ) etc etc. | | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > You mean one person, one vote. That's not direct democracy though. Here you refer to voting a representative, who may do anything. Direct democracy means people decide on things directly. It is probably not possible since not everyone has enough time to read every law, so representatives may have to be used but it could be that the people can decide on individual laws and wordings directly. We don't seem to have that form anywhere right now. | | |
| ▲ | defrost 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | See, for a comedic treatment, Peter Cook's The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970), co-written by Peter Cook, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Billington. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Rise_of_Michael_R... Relying on a combination of charisma and deception—and murder—he then rapidly works his way up the political ladder to become prime minister (after throwing his predecessor off an oil rig).
Rimmer introduces direct democracy by holding endless referendums on trivial or complex matters via postal voting and televoting, which generates so much voter apathy that the populace protests against the reform.
Having introduced direct democracy in a bid to gain ultimate power, Rimmer holds a last vote to 'streamline government', which would give him dictatorial powers; with the populace exhausted, the proposal passes.
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| ▲ | shevy-java 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't think there are tons of "leftists". Ever since Twitter changed into the tilted X insignia, led by a guy who keeps on raising his right arm, a gazillion of folks left. And I think more "leftists" left than "rights". It is an echo-chamber now. | |
| ▲ | armchairhacker 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People say BlueSky is like pre-Musk Twitter, i.e. leftist opinions in today’s Twitter style. Which is a bit strange because BlueSky is supposed to be decentralized (no central moderation); and although in practice it’s not, the BlueSky team seems pro-freedom (see: Jesse Signal controversy). I know there are some rightists (including the White House), but are they a decent presence? Are they censored? Are there other groups (e.g. “sophisticated” politics, fringe politics, art, science)? Mastodon is interesting. Its format is like Twitter, but most posts seem less political and less LCD-CW (e.g. types.pl, Mathstodon). I suspect because it’s actually decentralized (IIRC Truth Social is a fork; I didn’t write all posts are less CW). I’m curious to find other interesting instances here too. Pre-Musk, I remember seeing screenshots of the stupidest, most echo-chamber-y Tweets imaginable. e.g. “why do the cows all have female names, that’s misogynistic” (that one was deliberate satire but I’m sure most were). I’ll brag, I left around 2013 because I felt it was rotting my brain. I enjoyed a few more years off social media, with a healthy dopamine system. Unfortunately, now I’m here. | |
| ▲ | tokai 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not an unpopular take, just one not tied to reality. | | |
| ▲ | qsera 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >reality Which you seem to have exclusive access to, I suppose.. | | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | How many realities exist? When it comes to facts, there should always be one true fact. Anything aside from this is interpretation. |
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| ▲ | michaelmrose 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Weak minded folks are at least 40-50% of the population and there is a reasonable risk of them killing the human race or at least immiserating it. Unhinged leftists want what public ownership of the means of production whilst unhinged right wingers want concentration camps and may get them. I don't think it's reasonable to equate these things. | | |
| ▲ | 1718627440 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | In practice it used to turn out, that "public ownership of the means of production" also implies some amount of "concentration camps" and shooting at the border. The difference is one side shoots to the inside, the other one to the outside. | | |
| ▲ | 21asdffdsa12 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The one is also universally recognized as bad. The other is regularly brushed under "the implementation was bad" as a rug. both of these rugs are bloody red.
Demanding socialism should be considered a hate-crime, even though its mostly starving the poor through baked into the ideology economic miss-management that killed the masses. |
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| ▲ | swingboy an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Gulags? |
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| ▲ | i_cannot_hack 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You make it seem like it's not predominantly skewed right wing, just a "healthy" mix of right wingers and left wingers due to not banning anyone. Which might be an unpopular take, but in this scenario I think it's unpopular simply because it is demonstrably wrong. > A study published by science journal Nature has examined the impact of Elon Musk’s changes to X/Twitter, and outlines how X’s algorithm shapes political attitudes, and leans towards conservative perspectives. They found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm.
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-amp... > Sky News team ran a study where they created nine new Twitter/X accounts. Right-wing accounts got almost exclusively right-wing material, all accounts got more of it than left-wing or neutral stuff. (Notably, the three “politically neutral” accounts got about twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content.
https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo... > New X users with interests in topics such as crafts, sports and cooking are being blanketed with political content and fed a steady diet of posts that lean toward Donald Trump and that sow doubt about the integrity of the Nov. 5 election, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/x-twitter-political-c... > A Washington Post analysis found that Republicans are posting more, getting followed more and going viral more now that the world’s richest Trump supporter is running the show.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/29/elon-mu... | |
| ▲ | bonesss 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Twitter is not like it always was. The presence of oranges doesn’t speak to the volume or rot-level of the apples. Twitter has lost advertisers, credibility, and legitimacy. That’s objectively demonstrable in the calibre, quantity, and aims of their advertisers, and their loss of revenue. Twitter is hurting humanity, and has swaths of the population trapped in misinformation clouds. Arguably Elon bought the last election by purchasing it, and current administration issues are the result. But for the slow acclimatization and general brain fog of the “etch a sketch voters” we’d see Twitters direct reprogramming of opinion and behaviour as a psychic virus. You can tell which app people are hooked on by the lies they believe (with great emotional resonance). Social Media is becoming increasingly restricted from children based on objective developmental and cognitive impacts, I dare speculate we and our parents are the asbestos eating unfiltered cigarette smoking pre-modern victims who misused something terribly until we figured out how bad that shizz is for us. |
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