If the Twitter/X thing teaches you one thing, let it be this: Twitter was a neoliberal place. Then Elon Musk made it into X, a fascist place. Once again, neoliberalism laid the foundations of fascism. But that’s not the (whole) lesson… Neoliberal folks are still using X, calling it Twitter to make themselves feel better, and pining for the good old days. And there’s the real lesson: When neoliberalism turns into fascism, neoliberals will adapt to life under fascism. Right, class dismissed.
(We really need a better way to crosspost from mastodon…)
The conclusion is moot when the premise itself is wrong. Twitter was only “a neoliberal place” if you’re only looking at the neoliberal part of it. It’s like saying “YouTube is a site about sports highlights” because that’s all you watch.
If you used Twitter and only saw neoliberal garbage, that’s on you for following neoliberals. It completely ignores the majority of communities.
When I was active on there, if I saw a political tweet it was pro-socialist 95% of the time.
Aral is promoting the Fediverse.
He’s also saying neoliberals/centrists are largely performative, and they are fine with fascism. It’s a variation of the Nazi bar story.
There were always problems with Twitter’s moderation as it was lighter on the right than the left. The famous comment about not banning Republicans congresspeople comes to mind. It was never as right leaning as Facebook though.
There are plenty of ways one can promote the Fediverse without saying things that are factually wrong
“The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative.”
- Malcolm X
the white liberal likes money more than racism
the white conservative likes racism more than money
People are still calling it Twitter because X is a fucking stupid name.