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Twitter/X is an enormous national security threat on a global scale, and a lot more nations need to grow a spine and start blocking it (and taking other active, aggressive measures).

Mark Chadbourn@chadbourn.bsky.social

Statement from Mayor of London Sadiq Khan calling for Musk and his platform to be held to account:

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One of the best things Brazil did was ban twitter for a month, that alone caused irreparable damage to the platform's standing in Brazil, went from 22 million user to 16 million today. And since Elon hasnt dared to even mention our politics, just ban it, Elon is a pussy and will back off

Yes, I get that it’s hard for our global national security apparatuses and political systems to parse a world where a website as huge as X/Twitter gets turned into a vastly more dangerous form of 8chan - but it’s high time they woke up and banned that pestilence hole before it’s too late.

This both needs to happen and it is absolutely necessary for your nation & your sovereignty. Also though too, these nations of the world seem so unable to listen to & take advice of their digital best. They seem so liable to want to control & steer speech for not such noble reasons.

Why even bother with sovereignty if you roll over and piss like a spaniel whenever Elon Musk looks at you funny? What the fuck are we doing here?

The cynic in me says it's because Musk is unimaginably wealthy with the unimaginable resources that come with that Unfortunately, the non-cynic in me agrees. You think Musk is bad now, wait until he becomes a trillionaire.

kindly and respectfully: I did not explicitly state that a key reason why the world is suckling Elon Musk’s toes is because he has lots of money. Quite frankly I kinda assumed that was blindingly obvious

Having tried to the best of my capacity before - it's depressing to realize that in Canada, all political candidates appear to fall into exactly two categories: technologically illiterate, or completely captured by tech bros and venture capital. It's on us to produce better leaders.

Imo it’s not just that our current system struggles to parse a world where something like X is a threat, it willfully refuses to acknowledge that the ultra rich are sovereign, state-level actors unto themselves and must be treated as presumptively hostile. They threaten every nation’s sovereignty.

Piper@the-pied-piper.bsky.social

I worry we lack the terminology to discuss the threat of Musk. He isn’t a traitor to this country, rather he *IS* a country of one. He is personally richer than 150ish countries, Starlink is a geostrategic asset. He deployed armed mercenaries to US federal agencies & stopped Congressmembers.

I know that this is one of those inevitable outcomes of capitalism, but I worry it is much more than that. It’s a blind spot built in at such a deep level to our concept of states. But men like Musk and Bezos and Murdock wield such vast resources that they are indistinguishable from states.

And like all states they have a theory of international relationships and power. Invariably, theirs is one of entitlement to extraction. I am desperate for our states to recognize them as such. Even the useful idiots who think themselves working with Musk & friends are just self-preparing meals.

I totally agree. And maybe my thought here is dumb, but I do believe that liberal democracies need to work together to beat back fascism, and much of that starts by opposing MAGA and tech fascists here in the US

People are *far* too comfortable with the consensus circa 2010, where giant social media platforms were quasi-neutral arbiters of information rather than propaganda mouthpieces. But it's the 2020s now. Everything is geopolitics, all the time.

If the UK didn't ban it for the unconsensual nudes Grok was making, they wouldn't ban it for this. They're using the issues with Twitter/X to attack VPNs and manufacture consent for banning those.

Any idea how many respected & accomplished people patronize X? It’s mind boggling. They seem oblivious to the moral hazard & simply ignore the fact that their posta are “contained” by Musk’s algorithm. Dopamine rush, income? They’re preaching to the choir & bots, changing no one’s mind,