I didn't read through every comment, sorry if this point has been made already.
Without excusing all the bad things Elon Musk has done, I'd like to posit the following scenarios:
How would a smart person go about making Twitter grow? One path would be to open the platform to trolls and scammers, and peddlers of woo by refusing to moderate. Would that really work? Has it worked anywhere, including truly extremist sites?
Another way would be to get people foaming at the mouth by pretending that Twitter will radically change its policies. Encourage the fighting by dropping hints that a certain former President will soon be back. Give vague reassurances to their stoke their fears.
Remember that episode of South Park where the Devil fought Jesus? I'm looking for Elon to exit Twitter with several $100M in profits in the next year or two. After making essentially no changes at all to their moderation policies.
1. No. Because all decent people leave or never join and then the trolls, ect, have no one left to troll.
Yep, and that's why all the "non-woke" Twitter wannabes will always be in distant second place or worse. Prominent conservatives like Ted Cruz routinely used to post to Twitter about how they were gonna leave Twitter to go to Parler. Then never did...
It's almost like "woke" is a made up boogeyman that really means "people now acknowledge people we don't like as valid, and we get called out when we say something offensive". If it were really the plague they claim it is, they wouldn't have a choice in leaving- they'd be kicked off. After all, that's what they keep saying isn't it? That the "woke left" is banning them left and right and "cancelling" them? And yet, they're still on Twitter complaining about it...
These people have spent all of America’s history being able to say whatever they want, about anything, to anyone, whenever they want.
Anything less than that is a horrible “woke” affront to everything they hold dear…
Bingo. They've used their social power to silence people for generations, and now they're scared because they don't hold the social power anymore. Or at least, they no longer have a monopoly on it.
Another obvious tell is how many Conservatives reference the 50s as America's "Golden Age". Notably, a time when most of them were children (Jon Stewart has a funny bit about that), and a time when you very much
could be arrested and rounded up for saying the wrong things or simply not acting the right way. Though, in my experience, few of these people have even heard of the House Un-American Activities Committee. They never think about what was happening during the Red Scare when people were outed as "Commies" because it didn't and wouldn't happen to them. It only happened to people they didn't like, so it was fine. Or just as bad, it wasn't even on their radar because they have a bubble of awareness approximately 10 ft wide.
Once again, it's just projection. They're scared of these things because of what
they would do if they had the power and they can't comprehend that other people aren't the same way. They see it as fundamental human nature.
