Post

Here’s what’s happening on X/Twitter: it was fash central for a while, then Elon got the message that he couldn’t hold onto the sports-score and recipe-sharing people if they saw Nazis every time they skimmed their timelines. So he tuned the AI to silence the Nazis for people who aren’t Nazi fans …

We're seeing it right now in tech; a number of prominent tech commentators (all coincidentally happen to be wealthy & influential white men? huh!) have all just endorsed returning to Twitter again. But they weren't content to just _be there_ — they also insisted it's not a hostile environment.

So there's no self-awareness. They can't understand that they were targeted for outreach just as much as Black and trans people were targeted for abuse. Which makes it impossible for them to be part of using such a platform for political pushback, even if they don't think of themselves as fascists.

Is it possible to put out effective messages on hostile platforms? Sure! Zohran went on Fox and charmed them. But is a fash-apologist moderate gonna go on NewsMax and just... make things better through the pureness of his heart? (Which is apparently the centrist theory of change.) Demonstrably not.

Americans can't seem to understand that platforms can even HAVE purposes. They try to make every platform into the one and only place to be and consider it a failure if it doesn't become that. Even people here have that twisted idea!

There's a difference between using fash-adjacent platforms to organize, and reaching fash-curious people on those platforms. If doing stuff through Elon's platform would actually lead to better outcomes I could be convinced to hold my nose. But I won't try to persuade anyone over there.

I mean, it depends. I think there are normies who are probably, still, there for like... sports scores. There may be some way to reach them amidst the noise. Is that worth the effort vs. the other ways to reach them? I would have to see some pretty convincing data.

Clearly nobody understood McLuhan :/