Her leering, simian face has eyes that are paradoxically both vacant and filled with primitive hatred.
If I wanted that face glaring after me, I’d punch an albino silverback gorilla and abscond with its children.
Why, Elon? Why have you unleashed your online MAGA Frankenstein to grunt and bark and parry after my sanity?
I’ve heard good things about this social media network. But I question the marketing strategy of naming it after an extinct animal.
I always get a little nervous when I see myself trending on Twitter.
A friend of mine told me a little while ago it was only because so many people were leaving the platform: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
Yeah, the verdict is in for me. (And, granted, I’m late keeping up with all the news … it’s been a difficult holiday season here.) Elon Musk seems to be a pretty dubious champion of free speech.
I’m simply reading too many damning things about him banning journalists from Twitter for no apparent credible reason. And then there’s the bizarre, pathological sentiment in the tweet below. (Seriously, wtf?)
The man seems like a man-child fumbling both with the reins of his company and with a basic understanding of civil liberties. He seems to be demonstrating that he champions free speech just so long as it’s free speech that he happens to like. And peppering his tweets with oblique phrases like “the people have spoken” doesn’t change that.
I am not an expert on social media platforms, or big business or … anything, really. It’s easy to toss out words like “algorithms” without having any detailed understanding of how they work. Hell, even free speech issues can be a little more complicated than most people take them for. (At least I think so.)
So I’m not trying to pass any definitive judgement on Elon Musk’s handling of his company (or the management of the subordinates he’s selected).
But Twitter just isn’t enjoyable any more. My newsfeed has the feel of being completely random, without the links to articles that I find informative. (In fact, there appear to be far fewer articles of any kind.)
I’m seeing tweets from Marjorie Taylor Green, Newsmax and Musk himself, among other people. (I do not wish to follow any of those tweeters, yet here we are.) The strangest thing of all is that I seem to be seeing short videos of random violence in my feed (street fights, etc.). It’s all so very odd.
I no longer view Twitter as a helpful source of news and information from people that I trust. Yes … I realize that maybe I sound like someone who previously inhabited an online “echo chamber;” but whatever. I know that MTG and her followers are not an improvement. I’d rather have my existing biases confirmed than be an audience to that mad, rabid, semi-literate banshee-troglodyte from aryan-ass ghettos of white trash hell.
A pal of mine keeps telling me to migrate over to Mastodon. And another site called “Post” (?) seems to be getting a lot of attention. No verdict from me on those yet.
Anyway, I’m just chiming in.
I think the user experience on Twitter has definitely deteriorated somewhat since Elon Musk took over the company — at least it has for me. It just looks like the algorithms have changed for what appears in my newsfeed (or the scroll, whatever).
I seem to be reading far fewer tweets from people I want to hear from, and far fewer tweets that I enjoy. I’m reading vague yet grandiose religious tweets … if you know me at all, you know that those don’t appeal to me.
And I’m being targeted by spam in tweets for the first time ever. It’s happened only a couple of times, though — so I shouldn’t complain too much.
Maybe I shouldn’t bitch at all. Twitter is free. (And, no, I don’t think I’ve ever made a purchase due to advertising on the site.)
But I will say this — it definitely isn’t as fun as it used to be.
And “primitive.”
As I recall, they’d also have a problem with a president acting like a king — and attacking every check on his power, including the press, the courts, term limits, his political opponents and his own justice department. The pure f***ing imbecile even threatened Saturday Night Live with “retribution” for parodying him in a sketch.
The MAGA crowd only invokes the framers when it wants to evoke a vague, romanticized pretext for whatever weird, braindead, id-driven bullshit is on its anti-democratic agenda.
This is takin’ it waaaay back — people were joking about creepy vintage mechanical toys on Twitter, and it totally reminded me of the mechanical monkey I had when I was not much older than a baby. It was originally manufactured and marketed as “Musical Jolly Chimp” between the 1950’s and the 1970’s by Japanese company Daishin C.K., according to Wikipedia. But it was resold under various names on the street in New York City.
My guess is that my father picked it up for me after work in the 1970’s. (He was a municipal bus driver in Manhattan.)
It was loud. It did scare me — but I also remember loving it too, and it remained in my toybox for years. (Maybe I had a split personality as a little kid or something.)
Anyway, you can see the thing in action over at Youtube, courtesy of echelon16.
Photo credit: YuMaNuMa, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
If you want to see even 1 percent of what is happening in America’s cities right now, put aside Facebook and WordPress and get on Twitter. There is an abundance of footage from cell phone cameras and from local news stations.
Even before the current national crisis, I consistently learned 100 times more from my Twitter feed than from other platforms. (Of course it depends largely on who you “follow,” but still.)
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 