X Purges Prominent Journalists, Leftists With No Explanation
Ken Klippenstein, Steven Monacelli, and Alan MacLeod were all suspended from the platform.
Remember back when Elon kept calling himself a Free Speech Absolutist? That just gets funnier every day.
The_donald was the only lesson I needed to learn what conservatives thought of free speech.
It would be interesting to know what conservatives actually believe. By this point we've broken down each and everyone of their professed beliefs and found nothing of substance.
Here is a list of things I remember conservatives use to say their ideology was based on:
*Christian morals - You can even look back at their warped version of Christian morality from 1970s forward and still say today that Trump has fully exposed them to be baseless
*Small government - Trump and Co are actively trying to expand government authority and have successfully taken away the rights of woman all over the US
*Democracy - Trump told democracy to go fuck itself Jan. 6 2021
*Capitalism - Capitilism for the serfs socialism for the capitilists
*American Exceptionalism - At some point America was great but I'm not going to say when.
*No Child Left Behind - jk jk we knew that was bullshit from the get go
*Free speech - ahem I mean free 'hate' speech. all other speech is negotiable.
The list goes on my dudes. Would love to know what these people really believe. My guess is nothing. They are just mad and acting out. We've all seen it growing up. The people who just refuse to help themselves no matter what you do and you're constantly picking up the pieces for them.
"Conservatives don't care about free speech. Conservatives cares about power. Faithfulness, old-time values, homemade bread, that’s the just means to the end. It’s a distraction. I thought you would have figured that out by now."
Copied this from another post I made.. things make more sense when you realize what their true core principle is.
There is a good Adam Conover podcast episode where he interviews Corey Robin. In the episode Robin states the main premise of his book, which is that the central underlying ideology of the right is the belief that some people are better than others and deserve to be in power. A lot of the rights' beliefs and ideas evolve over time but they evolve in service of that core idea. It's the one thing that stays consistent over time going back to the french revolutions.
Multiracial, multiethnic, international cooperation, helping the homeless, helping the poor. No matter how you spin it by trying to convince them of the benefits ect, the right will never be on board. They don't believe those groups deserve help or should be helped. They fundamentally believe it is morally good to depower certain groups and empower other groups.
That one idea explains so much of the rights blatant hypocrisy. Welfare disproportionality going to red states is good because it's going to the good people. Rich people getting richer is good because it's going to the good people. Hurting minorities is good because they are the bad people, helping them is bad. Some people are innately worthy and some people are not. Anything the good people do is good, anything the bad people do is bad. The same action can be good or bad depending on who is doing it.
Conservatism is an excuse for your instant, emotional reactions.
If you formed your beliefs in schools over many years, that's why you're probably a liberal now.
They literally want to shoot people for simple larceny or for blocking the sidewalk in protest. It's an ideology for people whose lizard brains make all their "decisions." You know these people, how they just go through life reacting to things. You can trick them into believing anything. I'm not saying that if you're a conservative you're going to kill someone for blocking your sidewalk, I'm saying that if you lean into the ideology enough is literally deforms your amygdala and you lose touch with your ability to be rational.
One thing I enjoy is to get conservatives going about protests and police use of force especially with regard to public protests, civil disobedience, rioting, theft or destruction of private property.
Get them all fired up. You know, tell them the protesters threw snowballs and maybe ice at the cops first, and that they came into a private shipping yard, broke into private storage, stole whatever they could carry, and set a bunch of it on fire. You know, get them talking about how they'd empty the clip. Then you can reveal casually that you were talking about the Boston Massacre and Boston Tea Party. They remember from grade school how they are supposed to feel about these events, and they are unable to reconcile with their repressed and curious inner children. There defense mechanisms literally cannot process why they are advocating for the British in the revolutionary war.
You know, "what if these thieves and vandals burned your country's flags from all government buildings, shot all the police, and said they were forming their own government with a new Constitution and to fuck off?" I like to say they are just dumb but really they are just emotionally immature and regressing.
The Donald? Where you from you don't know:
I'm sure I'm forgetting twenty other things conservative literally tried to ban me from doing in my lifetime. Conservatives have zero credibility on free speech.
In Russia it's illegal to talk about it's invasion of Ukraine. It's called an anti-sedition law. Despite the First Amendment, anti sedition laws and seditious libel were illegal and punishable by long terms of imprisonment until lefty Supreme Court Justices decides so in 1964.
These Justices on there now will flip us right back to prosecuting people for saying Israel is doing a genocide, or for saying "fuck the draft," or for saying "fuck Donald Trump," but not for saying "fuck Joe Biden." Conservatives right now in America want laws that ban Americans from participating or even talking about "BDS." Our Supreme Court in America just recently upheld such laws, without really reaching the issue, but keeping the laws alive. They also push ag-gag laws. They have zero credibility on free speech.
It is abundantly clear that they do not believe in anything and operate on the basis of reacting in spite to anything they are told to. It’s basically one whole hemisphere of the political spectrum hijacked by propaganda. We genx folk thought that the free access to information on the internet would set people free but this what we got instead.
Care to elaborate that bit about capitalism?
As a non-American, I’ve been struggling to understand how Americans use these terms. Sure, I’ve seen plenty of “capitalism good, socialism bad” rhetoric, but what do people actually mean when they use them? Your example was particularly interesting, because it sounds like you’re implying that Trump promised capitalism, but failed to deliver.
Free speech absolutist means "I am absolutely free from the consequences of my speech"
I also remember a bunch of people saying Elon will preserve free speech. It looked like a cult.
That’s why I love asking, “Who groomed you to believe ______ as a truth?”
I don't get why people still use that platform. It's so hostile to the users. This is an election year and we're just going to give him all this influence? Society is a big dumb animal.
I have never seen the appeal to Twitter. It's never seemed like a useful part on social media. I have never heard a change and go "well now I will check it out."
It was extremely useful in sports for quick in-game updates, especially from third-party groups (like the news beat reporters, versus getting info from the team).
It's really entrenched, though: Even with all of the chaos and controversy, it's hard to find articles that reference something that happened in a game that don't embed some tweets (or whatever they hell they're called now) for the video. It's extremely frustrating. I think, in part, that's why the hockey community here on lemmy isn't taking off - no one wants to link to Twitter, and there are basically no other sources.
It always felt like a big void to shout into, unless you have some sort of following that listens.
I tried Mastodon recently... It rules. Would recommend.
It is the only platform where I can follow specific people without a algorithm getting in the way. They all need to choose a new one to move to.
Anyone who follows the alt-right, did Joe or anyone else go ape shit over this yet? I'm assuming that because they were going crazy over the previous Twitter about certain infractions under the old guard ... so this new shit must be driving them crazy. Being free speech activists and all that.
Cant wait for the Jordan peterson video
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/4kHZREDrbJY?si=FzjSXw_C8kKEiiur
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This was always going to happen.
Muskrat bought twitter specifically to make it Parler, GAB, and Truth Social all rolled into one.
Banning, shadow-banning, or purging any and all dissenting views or content that differs from the Far Right narrative on the sites is the norm.
The Saudis helped him buy it to try to stop future Color Revolutions
That too.
All the Far Right Authoritarians are just giddy about it all.
I can see several motives for him buying twitter.
Get trump elected, Because:
a) less taxes for the musky chodelet
b) less pesky safety and labour regulation for tesla/spacex/neuralink
c) drop support for Ukraine so he gets a shot at the rare minerals underneath it when russia has full control.
He's a useful idiot for trump and putin. Still not sure what the saudi angle is, though.
He's a cheap lay for the Saudis
FreEdOm oF spEAcH!
Free speech absolutist,okay?
It means absolutely no free speech to anyone criticizing him
The liberal media gets this all screwed up. He said:
Free speech?! Absolutionist!
They were obviously saying the wrong type of free speech.
I don't understand why people don't collectively quit Twitter and flock to Mastodon. It's very simple, it's better for everyone
Because for the previous 15ish years before Musky got a hold of it it was actually decently regarded. Many people turned to it for up to date news and trusted it. It was a place where brands could interact with customers, celebrities with fans, etc. It had built up trust. People are having a hard time letting that go.
FOMO is a very powerful drug.
ew. just ew
All those things that made twitter "useful" were terrible, even if it was good at it.
Even today there are top posts on Lemmy that are screen caps of Twitter. Not even Lemmy users can stop reading Twitter and upvoting. I down vote them on principle but it's 100 to 1.
Reddit and by extension Lemmy were designed to enable content aggregation. I dislike people having so few principles in general but the system is working as intended by users posting things they find interesting happening elsewhere.
Here's easy way to stop reading Twitter: not register there.
Twitter itself hepled me to stop reading it when it regwalled all the posts.
Because they don't care
Why are you booing me I'm right
Who the fuck is still on Xitter? Jesus people, get the hell out of there!
i keep wondering this myself, so many places are still prominently presenting the xitter button to follow them on,like it's a totally normal thing to do. it's fucking bizzare imo.
Lots and lots of people, apparently. And lots of those really really should know better.
Stop supporting that shithole, people.
As opposed to what? It's where the people they follow post. Why would they leave for somewhere that doesn't have any content they care about? It's like asking who the fuck is still on reddit. The answer is the enormous shitload of people who just want a steady feed of the same content they've always consumed.
A lot of researchers whose built a network on it. It's not as easy as it seems for them to switch to another social media. Each connection is important to know about new articles when they come out.
Too fucking bad. Also that's like .002% of the people there, at most.
Elon "Free speech absolutist" Musk.
Censorship for thee, not for me.
I hate this little thought terminating cliche. It's trying to make everything into hypocrisy which it isn't. Say he banned everyone who ever said anything pro Israel...you can fairly apply that rule across all people, and have disparate impacts.
The problem isn't that he's censoring others but not himself, it's that the rule itself is bad on its face.
This is hypocrisy. He called himself a "free speech absolutist" after he bought Twitter. He called it the "digital town square." Ever since then, he's banned anyone who says things he doesn't like and keeps the Nazis. He's absolutely a hypocrite and he should be called out on it.
Anyone who expects the bourgeoisie to platform those whose politics are a threat to capitalist interests is a fool.
it's funny because even Elon's ego is a threat to capitalist interests, look how much he's tanked their company value! Honestly I'm cheering for his self-destructive downward spiral to continue - twtter was always a cesspool, decent people should have left years ago.
Any day a venture capitalist fails spectacularly at screwing people over is a good day.
No official, public explanation. We know why...
They'll claim it was an accident or outage, but those accounts weren't struck at random.
Internally, is someone curating a list of prominent accounts by political leaning? Are those accounts the target or right wing report bombing? I want to know exactly how those accounts were landed on.
No, no, there's an explanation. The owner.
"Self-described free speech advocate censors dissenting views"
More news at 11.
X it's the new "Truth Social"
Elon bought it to make it the christofascist heaven on earth.
I don't like that, "leftist", has become a word used outside conservative circles. It sounds shitty and is as meaningless as, "rightist".
From a casual outside (the US) observer it just seems like it’s the price that gets paid in a two party state where there are apparently no centrists. Americans give me the impression that it’s either team Red or team Blue. Does anybody ever say: “I like a bit of this… but I also like a bit of that.”?
Yes, there are some who say that. They get agreed with in person, ignored at the local party/voting level, scoffed at by media, screamed at in general on the internet, and scolded on places like lemmy or reddit (if not screamed at). There are policies that I like that for some reason have to be lumped in with policies I detest no matter which party I look at. One party (fucking GOP) is way worse than the other, but try to have a rational discussion with anonymous or outside-of-your-social-circle people, and any criticisms of a party are like blaspheming their god.
I think the cops are useless at best and evil at worst and im pro gun/pro CC, I find that our model of capitalism has failed but I'd rather we revert to the political economic ideas of Henry George rather than Karl Marx. Not that either is possible without violent overhaul most likely. Even just a reframing of capitalism to correct for John Adams era economic fallacies would face nigh impossible resistance from those who have already taken most of the pie.
So yeah, we exist. It's just that we tend to get crowded out due to not falling in line with either ideology. I've been called everything from RINO to fascist.
They used to use liberal like it was something to be ashamed of. And I think they thought we were ashamed of it too. They finally figured out we don't have a problem with calling ourselves liberal, so they came up with a new word.
Leftist is an appropriate description. What word do you prefer?
Are we allowed to say he's gone mask off yet?
musk on, mask off
Needless to say, just like if r/conservative/conspiracy bans you you're probably doing something Right, X is just the new, louder, conservative/conspiracy echo chamber, although i still don't get why everyone senseable hasn't abandoned the platform yet.
If people would just use Mastodon instead of Xwitter this sort of thing would not happen.
Yes. Obviously, unquestionably, clearly, yes.
Yes it is, Mastodon isnt a single instance, its a many many instances. If you're not happy with the moderating/quality on one, move to another instance.
I think it's fine as long as their's no central corporate interest controlling the show. Which is a strength of FOSS, at least those projects with a robust and diverse community.
Musk can do whatever he wants, keeping Twitter (sorry, X, yuck) alive with billions that are peanuts to him. This news isn’t a surprise to me. He talked big about free speech, but it was just talk.
Musk's "free speech" is a lot like the Lost Cause's "states rights": a fig leaf that intentionally tries to distract from the fact that the only speech/right of concern was that of the most repugnant behavior.
You can call it Xitter.
Elon says preferred names and pronouns are dumb.
Thus I will only refer to twttr by twttr's original name.
Pronounced "shitter"
Or Xitler.
Don't care. The only people that can get kicked off of shitter are people still on shitter propping up it's waning credibility. There are no respectable people left on shitter because you can no longer simultaneously be there and be respectable.
Xitter* it’s poppin’!
What a coincidence. People critical of israel got banned
The account @Zei_Squirrel, which had 200,000 followers, explained in a Substack post that it was suspended over criticisms of Israel and Bill Ackman but was also not provided with an explanation from X. “If they don’t unban me, it will prove beyond all doubt that Twitter and Elon Musk are just explicitly doing the bidding of the genocidal Israeli regime and its deranged supporters like Bill Ackman.” The post continues, “There is no possibility that anything I have posted rises to the level of being ban-worthy, but nothing that Zionists posts constantly, explicit calls for genocide and mass killing of Palestinians, isn’t.”
Can people see now that when people clamour for controls on things like hate speech and disinformation, the question of "who defines what is/is not disinformation" isn't just sea-lioning?
It's a fundamentally critical argument against such controls. Sooner or later, people you agree with will be at the receiving end of them.
Using Twitter and substack? Could they possibly be working any harder against themselves?
Yes, they could limit their reach even further by only using the fediverse.
I mean... Many anti Israel folks are borderline abusive. Denying rapes happened, trying to call Hamas freedom fighters, praising the Oct 7th attack etc. This is the exact shit (and worse) platforms have been demonetizing or removing people for except this time it's the "other side" doing it.
This is a journalist, not some guy who argues with random people.
What are you even talking about? There is** zero evidence** for any rapes that is a straight up IDF Zionist story. Most of the rape "testimonies" have been completely debunked and proven to be falsified. Here is an article completely debunking it
I don't understand how you are so confidently repeated straight up conspiracy theories as if they are cold hard undeniable facts.
The fact that you think it's okay to ban people for people to questioning an extremely shoddy story full of inconsistencies and many straight up lies is very weird to me.
Weird that I haven't seen any of that on lemmy
Oh look, a propaganda mouthpiece
Remember when Musk painted himself as a free speech absolutist who would bring freedom to Twitter, and all of his fanboys believed him, and when he never delivered none of them did ever fucking care?
"Free speech is me telling you what to believe."
I don't know who said this, probably someone famous.
It's not free speech unless you mute people telling you you're wrong when you speak.
It's still free for them. In their mind, that's all that counts.
Night of the Long Bans.
I really do wish there was a viable popular alternative to Twitter. Phony Starks has been awful.
While it's not 1 to 1, mastodon seems to always be getting mentioned with businesses abandoning Twitter and moving there. I use it but it's just not the same experience
I've checked it out, but was never a twitter user anyways, so I'm not the right audience. I think the lack of an algorithm really hurts the experience for many users. Seems like you have to put work in to get your feed right. Also, the network effect Twitter has is strong. Mastodon is probably the least toxic social media I've seen though.
You say that like its a bad thing. Every twitter user Ive talked to wont shut up about how shit the twitter experience is.
He's not Stark, he's Justin Hammer. Always has been.
"I would like to point out that the social media network survived..." -Elon Hammer
Blue sky is close. Done by the guy that started Twitter originally.
a cartoon squirrel that tweets media criticism of figures like Glenn Greenwald
I don't know what it says about me that I know about the squirrel, but it's not nothing
Dead platform!
time to follow them on mastodon I guess.
Where is the "vote" to reinstate their accounts that closes like 58 minutes after going up?
T…. Time to leave?
"But... my followers!"
Get out of here Richers!
There's an explanation, we're just not allowed to say it because for some reason in "ThE lAnD oF tHe FrEe" we're not allowed to say the thing because the faschie right's feelings might get hurt.
It's a conspiracy and fascism echochamber. No prominent journalists should be there either way
Its ran by a hardliners rightwinger? I mean, its pretty self-explanatory.
The platform whose CEO openly endorses antisemitic "Hitler was right" Tweets would censor left-wing views? What a shocker!
I mean... it was no secret that xitter was a rightwing shithole, for quite a while now...
I’be taken to nicknaming him “Xitler”
I've been considering calling the platform FascX. Not sure how well it works though.
The X accounts of several prominent journalists and leftist pundits were suspended from the site, formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday morning with no clear explanation.
The suspensions affected several journalists and commentators, including Texas Observer journalist Steven Monacelli, Ken Klippensten of The Intercept, podcaster Rob Rousseau, and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News. The landing page for their accounts says it’s been suspended, but does not give any explanation as to why. A message on the profiles simply states “X suspends accounts which violate the X rules.”
The ban didn’t just hit journalists either. Several prominent-left leaning accounts were also purged from the website, including the account for the TrueAnon podcast and @zei_squirrel, a cartoon squirrel that tweets media criticism of figures like Glenn Greenwald.
That was the risk of remaining on the platform the moment musk took over. And if not then, when he started stripping it down and making it less reliable. And if not then, maybe when he started pursuing shadow banning again.
No government or news business has any business anymore being on Twitter. They should use the fedpub protocol and push out their messages there.
This will allow their readers/citizens to use a broad scala of apps to read them, allows more 3rd party apps to integrate them.
Governments and newspapers must hold the reigns over their own infra or risk this happening.
It's to entrench the far right audience so that Elon Musk can monetize and enrich right wing extremists. He knows that one reason they struggle to bring Apartheid to America again is that many of the hillbillies who support them are broke. Well now, if you're attractive, you can go on Twitter and if you spew enough unchecked, reactionary bullshit, you can get yourself a condo. They might even make you a fucking Senator.
You know what, great! While they're pretty fucking stupid for staying on the platform for this long, it's good that they have finally been forced off of it. Perhaps now they will find their way to something more federated friendly.
Musk is showing his other rich kid friends that he is got access to some buttons
I'd purge the leftists who lacked an explanation as well. #commasCount
Man I am so glad I ditched Twitter, now stupidly known as X, right when Musky took over. To be fair it's lasted way longer than I thought it would. Any bets on whether it survives 2024?
It's shedding advertisers and losing money so it's only a matter of time before the people Musk got to invest start making noise. It's in a downward spiral and there's no fixing it while Musk is in charge. I think it will survive another few years, but it's not going to be pretty.
Elon is psychologically compromised. Not sure if it's rampant drug abuse, mental illness unrelated to drugs, a brain tumour, or what. But the man is not on planet earth, and not in the way he would prefer. If he weren't a billionaire, he'd be sectioned/committed. Same with Kanye; that dude would be in care in no time flat if he were a regular Joe. This is one of the few ways that being rich and famous is a net negative; when you need help the most, you get enablers and yes men instead fermenting your insanity for their own purposes or out of fear for their own livelihoods.
My money's on kompromat.
Given his general dumbassery that's been on display for years, or is it decades now, it is not hard to see at all that he'd be easy to compromise.
If he weren’t a billionaire, he’d be sectioned/committed.
I mean, I think everyone has "that uncle" who they have to put up with for the holidays, and those guys are all walking around existing in non-sectioned/committed society. He'd just be another crank who is drinking the Kool-Aid instead of this rich fuck who everyone listens to despite their being whack-a-doo.
"Don't think of it as dying. Think of it as... getting out before the rush. "
I think I know why. Elon doesn't agree.
Hopefully all serious media members follow them.
These people need to get off Twitter anyways. This is a nonstory to me
Purging specific ideologies from a massively popular social media platform should probably be a story to you, regardless your opinion of the platform
Yeah i dont know why i click into twitter stories anymore.
Any explanation they'd try to give would be an obvious lie anyway. It's already clear what the real explanation is.
The situation is perfectly self-explanatory, however.
Quite sh(x)ittery