Now that Elon Musk has pretty much officially aligned the company formerly known as Twitter with Russia by cutting the Ukrainian armed forces off from Starlink and instead giving access to Russia, cancelling Alexi Navalny’s widow’s account, and acting as a mouthpiece for Russian disinformation and propaganda, I can no longer participate. Former Twitter has become a cesspool of bigotry, racism, disinformation, lies, and bots. Despite the substantial following BlogForArizona enjoys on the platform, I can no longer associate with the company and am cancelling all my accounts, including that of this blog.
I encourage all people of conscience who support democracy, self-determination and the truth against fascist authoritarianism, military aggression, and propagandistic lies and deceit, to do the same. I will no longer purchase any product or service from a Musk owned or operated company: he has proven himself the enemy of every value I hold dear and, at best, a useful idiot for bigotry, oppression, imperial aggression and authoritarianism. At worst, he is a moral monster who actively wants to return the world to an age when the wealthy and powerful could do what they want, and the rest of us could only suffer the result of their depredations in silence and comply.
I certainly understand the allure of being able to access and participate in what had once been an exciting and open public forum that had the instantaneous feedback of a conversation over the garden wall with the whole world, but that platform is dead and we are merely conversing in a graveyard of Musk’s making. By carrying on despite the obvious fact that the Twitter we knew and loved is dead and buried, we are giving continued relevance and power to ideas and people who deserve neither. I will no longer have any part of it.
If you want to get hot takes and news comments on topics relevant to Arizona from BlogForArizona in the future, we have established accounts on Threads (though Meta isn’t a much better corporate citizen), Mastodon, and BlueSky. We haven’t settled on our preferred platform, as yet. I invite readers to make the case for any of these services that have grow into alternatives to Musk’s murder of Twitter. Thus far we have been most active on Threads, as it currently has the best workflow integrations. Please visit us on those alternative platforms and subscribe.
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I recommend toot.community in the Mastodon fediverse. I’ve had an account there since 2022. It was the first social media (sm) account I ever established. I had stayed away from twit, FB, IG, TikTok and anything else where I was the product. Given my lack of experience with sm, it took a while for me to understand what it was all about. At first, I viewed it as a huge party where I didn’t know anyone and it was up to me to find interesting people (accounts) to follow. I quickly learned there are some odd people on sm but mod tools control who gets in your timeline. The reason I like toot.community is that it’s not huge and it’s not tiny, about 31K users (https://fedidb.org/network/instance/toot.community). The whole instance (server) is supported by Jorijn who runs it on his company servers and appreciates donations but doesn’t charge. Try it, you might like it for no other reason than you’ll no longer be supporting a narcissistic, misogynist, racist fascist. Leave GQP_GOP MAGA morons on xitter to stew in their own hate.
Not for the first time, a rich person and/or a corporation has seen something successful, hought it, changed whatever made it successful in order to make more profit, and wondered why it was no longer successful.
Twitter, though not perfect, was freewheeling and interesting.
Then Musk bought it.
I agree Mike. I dropped out of Twitter a year ago when Musk publicly said that people should vote Republcan. Twitter is a sewer of right-wing propaganda.
EXCELLENT CALL THANKYOU!
LIVE WITH OUR VALUES.