I thought the whole point of being right wing was being negative?
When your whole identity is consumed by boundless, baseless, joyless hatred of “the other”, yes, you’re gonna be negative.
I don’t believe Musk is controlled by any of that though. He might share in it, but it doesn’t quite dictate him as much as it dictates those in actual misery. For example, he isn’t actually opposed to letting immigrants in, if they’ll make him richer. He’s motivated by greed and grift, and no small helping of pride.
I suspect he just doesn’t want people criticising him and his cronies. Particularly when they inevitably start enacting policies that affect their base negatively (we’ve already seen our share of face-eating leopard voters shocked to find out that their face isn’t off limits), social media could help pissed off people realise how many others are pissed off too. I don’t think I need to spell out why that could be dangerous for him.
Better to quell dissent entirely. If nobody can complain about the government, it’s harder to organise against it. Suppress criticism, censor the media, manipulate what you get to see to shape your view…
(Obligatory note that calling a dictatorship communism doesn’t make it less authoritarian than a capitalist dictatorship. Red boots hurt just as much as any other color if they step on your neck, no matter how tasty they might be. That has nothing to do with the topic, I’m just bracing for tankie whataboutisms.)
I was being slightly sarcastic cause right wing folk seem to be very negative, or nostalgic, but in a negative sense. But I get your point.
Oh you’re absolutely right, I just felt like spelling out the subtext of “Musk isn’t in it for the right wing mentality, just for the power” that I thought you were hinting at but left unsaid. I wasn’t trying to contradict you at all, but rather to expand on your setup.
I appreciate the comment cause it’s definitely something I haven’t considered enough.
Now that the election is over and we won, let’s remove our bots. - musk
Ah, but there are still elections in other parts of the world, like Germany, where he is also very active
Oh, c’mon, who’s going to tell him he is the best dad? He needs them.
I mean, he will on an alt.
No, bots are still needed for hating illegal immigrants.
Immigration hate causing backlash against H1Bs, abort, abort!
Lol. Free Speech guy!
A cisgender guy.
(This comment has been removed for violating X’s policy on the use of derogatory slurs)
Now that the election is over, he’s hiding the lightning rod.
No no, guys, you’re misunderstanding. He MEANS there’s too much negativity from people saying things like “X sucks since musk bought twitter…”
He’s going to change those people’s tweets to say “X is great!”
And by that I mean he’s going to have a team to edit tweets that he doesn’t like!
If that’s not free speech, then Musk doesn’t know what is!
This has nothing to do with Twitters image. He could have enforced that decision sooner if it was. This is about Trump. The negativity was helpful during Bidens presidency. Now that Trump is about to take over everything has to look like the world is happy again. It’s political manipulation.
A team? You mean ChatGPT?
This is exactly what he means.
Next up the sanctioned daily hate.
He could start by killing himself.
If there’s going to be fantasies about murder, can his whole posse go out?
This is a fantasy about suicide but… yes.
It’d be great if they all got together for Jonestown 2.0.
If someone were to poison the food at mar a lago, that person would have done more for this country than anybody else in the past 50 years.
Gotta catch that starship to Mars!
Wish I could know what this said before it was censored
Check out the mod log.
Just looked: regardless of your personal opinion the comment is a breach of the terms of posting. It essentially said Musk should permanently retire himself from life.
It said basically the equivalent of musk should piss on the 3rd rail. Mods arbitrarily removed my comment, probably because it included the phrase ‘kill himself’, while allowing these various replies that aren’t qualitatively different. Mods do need to feel important.
negativity about him.
Yeah the best thing Trump can do for himself is Epstein another friend
Now that his pick has won the election there’ll be no need for negativity now!
My bet is on a scenario where Elon is going to ban people for using ‘cisgender’ term rather than downranking them.
Should just use his AI to turn all the negative comments into positive ones.
Problem solved 🙃
Elon Musk is a disgusting piece of shit.
Positivity Bot: Elon musk is a silly poop particle 😁
Flip you, you’re a silly sausage!
Um, Elon Musk is a… brilliant man with lots of well thought-out, practical, ideas. He is insuring the financial security of this company for years to come. Oh yes, and his personal hygiene is above reproach.
Yes, that town square needs to be happy. That’s a happy democracy!
Mate, the bunting looks awfully like swastikas…
But happy, less negative swastikas, right?
Sure.
What an unserious human Musk is.
Closing the shop will achieve that goal perfectly.
Project mayhem needs to take his balls
He’s shutting down his account?
No he’s gonna ban anyone who disagrees with him.
That ain’t going to turn down the negativity though
X/Twitter is a misinformation platform. If you know a major influencer that uses, consider informing and directing them to the ActivityPub alternatives and even consider advertising on their platforms if you can.
I like how you say “that uses” instead of “that uses it” because the former generally implies drug use.
Good point, best to leave it like that 🙃
Sadly we lost that fight to the other centralised platform in Bluesky
Anything that’s not Twitter is good
Blue sky (and just about anything else) is an improvement, but remember, there is no bottom, things can always be worse. Truth Social and Gab both still exist.
These websites, because they are all centralized, are all ultimately moderated in accordance with the whims of their owners, the effect of which was thrown into sharp relief after Apartheid Willy Wonka bought Twitter.
With a federated platform like Mastodon, no single owner would be able to do this. If an instance suddenly became terrible, they could be de-federated and they’d lose their reach.
Of course, if one instance became particularly large, the ‘whims of the owner’ problem would come right back, but at least the alternatives would still be readily available.
