Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has had his account on X - formerly Twitter - reinstated by Elon Musk.
Musk asked users to vote in a poll whether or not to lift a Jones ban pre-dating his ownership of the platform, signalling he would honour the result.
Around 70% of roughly two million respondents voted to lift the ban.
Jones is most notorious for falsely claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, in which 20 children and six adults died, was “staged”.
He was ordered to pay $1.5bn (£1.32bn) in damages to family members of the victims, after courts found he had caused them to be subjected to harassment and death threats with his false claims.
They don’t want this! Control comes with responsibility and is expensive. Twitter is already there, has been there for a long time, and still has the users and the mindshare. It’s still the logical choice for organizations wanting to reach the widest audience.
Fortunately that last bit does seem to be changing. It’s not happening as fast as many of us think it should, some prominent organizations have left X. Hopefully more will continue to do that, but calling the stragglers fascists, as was done earlier in this thread, is not a productive way to engage.
Lemmy.world, one of the largest instances said it costs around $1500 per month and about $200 to set up, I don’t think it’s expensive. If all of one state’s government puts it on Mastodon, then everyone under that can post as well under that umbrella. This isn’t a huge deal or groundbreaking.
How much does their paid staff cost?
State government doesn’t operate on a volunteer basis.
To do what? They have websites they maintain already. There are already companies switching to Mastodon like BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63534240
Who says the government has to hire anyone? Have the sysadmin set it up, have your existing Twitter staff swap to using mastodon, done.
But nobody will see it if it’s on Mastodon
The responsibility only matters if their server is open, they could have one just for their employees like it is done with email.
But there is another option and it only requires web server which they already have. It is called RSS feed.
Mastodon accounts can actually be subscribed to with RSS
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