Twitter now looks like a burning garbage container rolling down a steep hill toward a nuclear power plant, but I persist and sign: it’s a great tool.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
I say Twitter now looks like a burning garbage container because the place smells worse and worse. The virulence of the trolls – anonymous or not – makes the air a little more unbreathable there every day. It feels like the waiting room of the mental asylum.
Uninhibited Trumpism has multiplied the number of aggressive accounts that only exist to insult the ideological “enemies” of what is a modern far-right nebula. Even here, in our latitudes. Then came the pandemic, which created hordes of anti-health rabids who made Twitter the place of all their fights, of all their obsessions.
I’ve always said that to exist on Twitter, you have to block intruders. So, just before the pandemic, in February 2020, I had blocked 1600 accounts in 11 years. A year ago, after 20 months of pandemic: 5257 blocked accounts.
I just checked: I blocked 8181 accounts. There is inflation even in the blocks on Twitter. At this rate, I should hit the plateau of 10,000 blocked accounts by 2023.
I’m not complaining about anything, I see. I don’t believe I blocked 8181 people in the flesh, I believe that on Twitter loads of people have multiple accounts which they deploy in a way to make it look like there are more of them.
Some have ideological, political or commercial objectives. Others just don’t have a life and thus give themselves a kind of artificial importance: the power of nuisance is a stump of power, but power in their head all the same.
Twitter is a game of shadows and mirrors: we don’t always know who is who, we often don’t know who is hiding behind an account. Just as we learned that the Russians were manipulating Facebook in 2016 to help Donald Trump, we recently learned that Twitter accounts were run by China to destabilize the United States.
Similarly, Twitter is a small player, numerically speaking, more modest than Instagram and Facebook. But Twitter is popular with politicians, journalists, activists of all kinds. People who speak loudly, who radiate. But a boss of The Pressa few years ago, explained to me that Bing generated more visitors to lapresse.ca than Twitter…
Do you know what Bing is, without Googling that name?
Answer: it’s Microsoft’s search engine…
I’m telling you about Twitter because the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk, bought the platform. A hyperactive user of the platform, the CEO of Tesla made a purchase offer of 44 billion US dollars, an offer which he withdrew before being forced to honor it.
Paying $44 billion for Twitter is like paying $100 million for the corner store.
Musk is a libertarian. Libertarianism is as ideologically rigid as Maoism, except that this ideology now controls the Republican Party in the USA. For libertarians, we should be able to say anything, anyhow, to anyone. Example of saying anything: Musk once compared Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler, in support of Ottawa’s “freedom” convoy, no less.
I point out that Musk has already said he finds Twitter too woke and that he wanted to “restore the balance” by buying it. The far right celebrated when Musk took over Twitter: I imagine they recognized the tweeter-in-chief (his expression) as sympathetic to their views. Racists even started chanting the word that starts with an N on Twitter, just to see if they would get banned…
It hadn’t been 72 hours since Elon Musk was the boss of Twitter that he relayed a completely laughable conspiracy theory about this assassination attempt against Nancy Pelosi (number 3 of the American government) at the hands of an intoxicated demented to far-right disinformation.
In this, Musk is in line with Twitter, which has become the Tesla of global disinformation for a few years.
Many wonder if they will stay on Twitter with the arrival of Elon Musk. Musk has already said he’s going to charge $8 a month to those with the little hook of a “verified” account, which is my case. I will not pay, on principle.
On the other hand, I would pay $20 a month if everyone paid to open an account: losers-no-life who run 30 accounts to harass their targets from the comfort of their mom’s basement won’t pay $600 US per month to do that, they will find other hobbies…
Like what ?
I suggest the reproduction of the Olympic Stadium in popsicle sticks, to start with.
I persist and sign: Twitter is a great tool, which is part of my daily information diet.
Since 2009, I have discovered voices, ideas, points of view and media that I would not have discovered otherwise. It’s like injecting yourself intravenously in real time. For a journalist, it’s like heroin: it’s addictive.
I explained to you my analogy of Twitter as a burning garbage container. Here’s why I think this container is headed for a metaphorical nuclear power plant: With Musk, God knows what will become of Twitter as a conduit for misinformation and conspiracy theories, as the world’s leading fact-digger.
I hold my nose, I stay on Twitter, but I’m not optimistic.