Ok, it’s only a couple of days past Halloween, so here’s your horrific thought for the season: is there an immutable rule of the universe that prevents someone creating a replacement for Twitter after Musk breaks it?
You’re welcome. 🙂

Couldn’t agree more. Twitter is on the same level as the graffiti that got written on the desks at my rough North East comprehensive school.

Aris is right about Twitter functioning as a communication arm of “The Cathedral.”

Consider: Progressives aren’t concerned that THEY will be expelled from Musk’s Twitter.

They are only concerned that the people they hate WON’T BE expelled.

This is one of the best piece of journalism I’ve read in a long time. Thank you Aris!
As an avid consumer of tweets with an anonymous account I’m looking forward to log off from Twitter in its current format.
My only fear though is: what would come next? How long will be before a Twitter clone will reappear even if Elon destroys (or rather fundamentally changes) the beast? Is it Twitter that needs to be reformed or is it something else?

This seems right, e.g., that the anxiety of many lib journalists is that Musk will change the social/professional credit mechanism they now rely upon and level a playing field formerly fixed in their favor. Not so complicated, and knowing this fact, will make it far more interesting and amusing to watch as things play out.

I doubt that Musk can afford to write off $44bn – an insane amount to pay for worthless opinions. He presumably has other plans. My guess is fewer contributors offering higher quality content and perhaps genuinely intelligent debate. As it were, an Amazon for journalism. If so, the rest of the media have reason to be afraid.

Some interesting analysis. And yet the author’s failure to mention that he was a video journalist for VICE that ended up being destroyed by Twitter – as ruthlessly as it itself sought to destroy the old journalism – comes across as a rationalisation for the hurt (which anyone involved in situations like this knows) that comes with a business failure to a company the author felt attached to.

“The greatest power that will accrue to him… is…by…forcing us all, finally, to log off.“
Nobody needs to force you to log off. It’s a very simple action that you can take, entirely on your own, by simply deleting your account and the web access on your device. If you think that logging off is the answer (as i do), then we just need to never log on again, and develop an I-don’t-care attitude towards whatever junk the twitterati are pushing out this week.

Well said Aris! Thank you

Then Musk would indeed be a hero

A good analysis generally, but combined with an absurd expectation. People do not throw $44bn away just to make a political point. Well, not when it’s their own money anyway (when it’s other people’s money, multibillions on white elephants, blue moons and flying pigs is the norm).

Elon Musk is good at making money. He bought Twitter because he believes he can make it profitable. I would not bet against him where this is concerned.

A weak article that keeps on confusing honest and decent liberals with bloody ideological Leftists and burns the wet and dry together. Any author who can’t tell the difference between the Left and classical liberals should be avoided.

The mainstream media of … when…USA in …which decade? Or here …. when? Has gone for good…firing the servers into the sun won’t free people to return to some version of the good old news days.
That boat has sailed and news is disintermediated in a way it never was in the Analogue era, and will remain so.
I think it is very democratic. Years ago the big news conferences every day were agenda setting in a way they cannot be now.
We are in a transition period still with broadcast, print and online legacy news (organisations, titles, news and comment shows, and individual journalists) still involved in toxic feedback loops with social media as the article says, but I think that is the problem rather than social media as such.
I can follow whatever police twitter I want, and the ONS, and any number of organisations directly, and then see informed critics directly comment , and discuss often, with the author(s).
The Ukraine war is a good point, there is far more first person video these days than reporter mediated news, it is usually hours, even days ahead of MSM reporting.
So I am not so negative about Twitter and social media in general and the reception Musk has had sort of confirms there was a wokey, ‘progressive’, liberal bias in the past that many people were very comfortable with.
Hopefully ordinary people will continue to learn how to navigate a very noisy public space well, and , as the article says, if many academics, journalists, historians etc come out looking diminished, that is because they have usually said daft things.

Twitter and the rest of the leftist kabal are not “liberals” in the US meaning ie Social Democrats – or the older meaning – ie Hume, Mill, Rousseau etc. they follow Marxist Leninism and its illegitimate offspring “socialism in one country”. They cannot co-exist with democracy because the average human is not stupid enough to believe that these muppets have found the keys to the human condition when 4000 years of philosophy agrees it probably can’t be done. This explains why commies and socialists (national or internationalist) only seek de-facto power – for example twitter -because they have no ability to gain de-jure power. Twitter will die out like the USSR and 3rd Reich but if Musk gives it helping hand good for him. I am not a fan of his cars, or rockets or paypal but i am sure he’s got some good in him unlike the banally evil characters that populate twitter’s offices.

I’m truly baffled by the blind faith the Muskans place in their savior. Yesterday I read that Musk is keeping Twitter’s chief sensor Yoel Roth, who once called Trump officials nazis, when the real ‘nazis’ have always been Democrats.
Not a good sign.