April, 2023 archive

Katharine Trendacosta, writing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, takes a look at Elon Musk’s stewardship sewership of Twitter. A snippet:

Twitter’s good qualities—features and practices that many users all over the world came to rely on—are all but gone now.

Follow the link for her reasoning.

Aside:

As I may have mentioned, about the time of Twitter’s creation, I heard an interview with one of its founders on my local NPR station (WHYY in Philly at the time–I forget who was the interviewer and who was being interviewed); the person who was being interviewed droned on and on about how this new thing was going to contribute to the discourse.

The interview convinced me to have nothing whatsoever to do with Twitter, and I’ve never regretted that. But I have also watched as Twitter became a go-to outlet for many of moment. I have watched as (far too) many persons came to rely on it for news, information, and commentary. And I will concede that, before Musk at least, Twitter as an organization did not seem to have an agenda other than to grow itself; it bumbled and it fumbled, but it usually tried–with mixed results–to get it right.

(In a larger context, I have become convinced that “social” media isn’t. It amplifies asinine and drowns out dutiful, magnifies mendacity and disrespects data, as its secret algorithms suck users down labyrinthine rabbit holes of hate and hostility so as to “attract eyeballs” amd “foster engagement.”)

Still, it’s a shame to watch Musk mangle something that had risen at least to the level of mediocre.