Well, I am banned from Twitter once again. I made a “Free Palestine” post, and apparently that was the last straw. My account was suspended, and the email I received claimed it was for evading a suspension, which is funny because that was never an issue, and it’s never been an issue for all of the Nazis on the site, who seem to pop up at any given moment at any time to lay down their poison.
It’s probably good, though. Twitter / X whatever you want to call that abomination, has reached the point where it’s mostly bots, Nazis, and TERFs. Someone posted a picture of the genocide in Gaza, where Palestinian kids were in a hospital covered in blood and bandages, and someone with “DEATH TO HAMAS” in their username was laughing and saying the kids deserved it, and they couldn’t wait until the IDF finished them off.
They weren’t banned. They weren’t even scolded.
That’s the environment that exists there now, and I mean moreso, because Twitter’s always been kind of on shaky ground in that respect, but outright Nazism, outright advocacy for genocide was banned. Not anymore. On Elon Musk’s “free speech” platform, you can say just about anything you want to anyone you want, with no repercussions, unless you use the word “cisgender,” at which point your reach is removed, and people can’t see that post in their timelines.
I cannot tell you how many literal Nazis, I mean literal Hitler loving Nazis with swastikas, the SS tattoos, the demand for a white ethnostate, those Nazis, are on Twitter, but it’s a fuckload, and they’re just as pervasive as the porn bots and t-shirt bots who litter every single feed with garbage.
Twitter is a horrible place, and so many people I know are leaving it every day. If I had to guess, I’d say half of the site’s membership is now bots, paid influencers, and desperately lonely Elon Musk stans who would drink his piss if he put it in a bottle and slapped a $20 a month price tag on it.
It’s so pathetic, so sad, honestly, to see what was once considered a kind of internet front porch is now a fascist crack house. I think the internet deserves better than that, but then again I’ve been on it for 30 years, and I’ve grown a little soft in my old age about the potential of the internet versus much of the outcome.
I remember the first time I got on the internet: the real internet. It was back in 1995, and our high school library got its first modern computers: Two brand new Apple PowerMac 5200s, with a cd-rom drive, and an ethernet connection which plugged right into the school’s T1 line.
The first website I ever got to visit was a school’s book server in Australia. I was mesmerized.
And now here we are, watching as Nazis, TERFs (I repeat myself), Israeli Nationalists (Zionists), and some of the absolute worst people possible swarm a website owned by a man who encourages them to be the absolute worst people on Earth because he’s so goddamned insecure that his transgender daughter hates his guts (and rightfully so).
In a better world, if this would have happened, Twitter would have folded almost immediately. Instead, it’s hanging on by a thread, the money schemes of its owner finding new ways to bilk subscribers out of more cash in an effort to recoup his fucking moronic $45 billion investment that was devalued to 1/10th of that in record time.
Elon Musk has never created anything except drama and frustration. Everything attributed to him that is good was done by better people from whom he bought their product and slapped his name on it as “founder.” He’s a joke, a fool, a charlatan, a great example of Dunning-Kruger when it has more money than God.
Hopefully we’ll move beyond the Elon Musks of the world, but right now the tech industry’s full of them and their white supremacist incel outlook on life. We deserve better than that, too.
In the meantime, I’m over on BlueSky, and most of my comrades are there, too, so at least I have that in the realm of social media.
.Red
