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.
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If you’re still on Twitter, you’re a fascist sympathizer, full stop.
Some people are just oblivious. Take my dad, for instance. He told me last week “so Twitter is now called ‘X’!” Uh, yeah, thanks.
But he’s probably not on twitter since it also changed its look.
He is, he uses it every day. For some reason he assumed I hadn’t heard of it which I guess makes sense as I deleted my acct and don’t use it at all, but I mean, it was all over tech news for a couple months.
Um idk about this blanket statement
Ehhh Twitter has been pretty friendly to anti-democracy types for years now. January 6th was literally organized on the app and that was way before Musk. At this point I have an extremely hard time believing any regular Tweeter who claims ignorance.
Well I’m guess am a fascist now, thank you for the heads-up
Personally I only have an account still because it’s the way I log into Disqus and I don’t remember my actual Disqus password. I don’t actually go on X/Twitter unless linked to by a post or something, and even then I’m usually not logged in because I don’t have the app on my phone, and I do lemmy browsing on phone.
Is password recovery not working?
What a ridiculous idea. People rely on Twitter for their job and aren’t interacting with the politics of social media. They’re sympathizers for daring to have a job that involves being seen on social media. Regardless of your view of Twitter, people aren’t leaving Twitter and that means their customers are still reliant on it for a source of info on many content providers.
Humor me, if you don’t mind. What jobs require the use of Twitter?
Communication departments for basically every public transit service?
They should get an instance on mastodon and control everything about it.
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.
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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Yeah good luck getting the average transit user to figure out and use mastodon
You don’t have to sign up, just have a link from your website like they do twitter. Not sure why you guys are trying to find the negative. This one is a no-brainer.
I dont have Twitter or children, but I know some school districts exclusively use Twitter to announce school closings or delays from weather. To play devil’s advocate towards myself, parents could just listen to the radio or watch their local news, both of which usually/used to have school closings listed.
I don’t have an opinion abt this, I just have friends that are still on Twitter because they follow their kid’s schools.
Any job where you have to sell your image or show your work to get sales. Such as artists, news sites not part of MSM, and content creators. While there are various sites, none of them work as well as Twitter at sharing info and getting your info in front of new users.
If you are still on by choice then I’d agree with the OP. If you need it for work then that’s different, but you should be trying to move off it.
People did, but Twitter is no longer reliable: https://youtu.be/0kwtVbM5o-o
Yes, they are.
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https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/twitter-users-vote-elon-musk-quit-ceo-poll-rcna62332
A year ago next Monday, Musk asked “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll”. The votes came in, 57.5% to resign, 42.5% to stay. If you’re wondering how much he care about polls where he hasn’t pre-ordained the outcome.
He did step down… he hired a CEO to run day to day.
He was going to do it either way though
Also, don’t think that CEO doesn’t do whatever the fuck he wants, it’s a puppet
Probably true, but it wasn’t the best choice of example to use above against him.
Edit: misread comment about CEOs gender, you were referring to Elon so I removed the correction.
Now is a good time to debate following the letter of the law vs the intent of the law.
He didn’t hire a CEO though.
He hired a scapegoat with the title of CEO.
“Let’s see, how can I make it even shittier…?” -Elon
Next, he should hire Andrew Tate for a management position
Is that guy out of Romanian prison yet?
I believe he’s been under home detention for a while.
Coincidence that he just also appeared as a guest on Tucker’s show for the first time ever? I think Alex is getting some kind of push somehow/somewhere to spew his bile back into the limelight.
I’m sure it’s for the 2024 election… the right is drumming up the crazies to get out and vote for the orange traitor.
Hmmm I wonder if we’ll see Trump guest on Infowars like he did for the 2016 election.
I mean if it happens he is going to have to pay the Sandy Hook families the money he owes. Dude is still on the hook for a cool billion with 2 trials to go.
He’s been getting a lot of love from Russia, and the GOP and Russia are best friends
There we go. Now it’s officially Truth Social as run by Elon Musk. He could have just bought the actual Truth Social for way less.
But he got a huge huge audience, which is what the other platforms lack. It was a realy good move if your goals are to try to move social media massively to the right, shut down conversations you don’t like, etc.
It may have been expensive, but way cheaper than buying or starting a new platform and trying to get that size of an audience and apparent lock-in/addiction.
I’m convinced he did it for the '24 election. He lost a lot on Twitter, but he stands to gain a lot more if trump wins.
Remember that last election, all major social media sites released a “fact check” on content at the last minute, completely hijacking Trumps strategy of lying about everything.
Freedom of hate speech
Good, now advertisers have even less reason to spend money on that platform
He seems to be going all in on “fuck those who left, I don’t need them” philosophy
On the one hand, it is sad to see what Twitter has become. On the other hand, it is a bit funny, as Truth Social is more likely to fail the more X takes on their userbase. Which is hurting Trump right in the wallet.
Twitter has always sucked and destroying it at his own expense is the one good thing Musk has done. He should buy Facebook next.
I see we’re still reporting on X as if it retained any kind of importance or significance. Quaint.
I appreciate the heads up that we’re going to be hearing from Alex Jones again soon, regardless of who, exactly, has chosen to platform him again. This is awful. He’s a hateful, horrible person, and I don’t look forward to the conspiracy theories he’s going to create again.
Thank you. Tired of hearing about this clown, as if doing alt-right shit is novel. It’s only newsworthy when he does something progressive by accident.
Musk has a great deal of control over:
- Satellite internet
- Low Earth orbit launches
- Electric vehicle charging infrastructure
- Social media
His choices impact world events whether you “hear about this clown” or not. Ignoring him doesn’t change that.
Okay, but “asshole let’s asshole onto his platform of assholes” isn’t any of those things, nor is it somehow surprising and novel and therefore worthy of the bytes needed to convey this “news.”
ETA: What is the purpose of an article like this? It’s certainly not to convince people like us, so it must be either for people who don’t stick Elon in the “malignant asshole” category by default, and/or it’s ragebait.
If someone in the former category thinks Alex Jones being let back on is the last straw and not the litany of other transgressions, then they and these authors deserve each other.
It’s for us who listen to Knowledge Fight to get a preview of what’s coming up.
Hello, fellow Wonk.
Just keep adding more water to the ship, please!
Xcho chamber
Smells like desperation 😤
Sometimes I scroll YouTube shorts when I’m bored, and there will always be at LEAST one Alex Jones short that pops up, despite my only engagement being to quickly downvote it and skip it. It drives me crazy
Clicking on the short is engagement.
Downvoting is engagement.
Commenting how much you hate, disagree, or feel stupider for watching, is engagement.
Scrolling past the clip and entirely ignoring it, is not engagement.
So… Don’t engage, and remember:
Being happy reduces engagement.
Being angry increases engagement.
The algorithm doesn’t care how you feel, just how long it can keep your attention.
The lack of engagement? Believe it or not, still engagement!
Only for the engagement metrics used to set advertising prices and bill the ad buyers.
From socialvideoplaza.com
You’ve probably heard the myth that dislikes are a form of engagement. And since engagement is the social currency in which YouTube videos are paid, it makes your video perform better in the YouTube rankings. If that information was true in the first place, it is outdated now.
[the dislike button] is used in the algorithm for a couple of things: It is a sign to the algorithm that it should suggest less videos of that creator to the viewer.
As trustworthy a source as socialvideoplaza.com clearly is…
Google has a different take:
YouTube engagement metrics (views, likes, dislikes, and subscriptions) reflect how many times your YouTube video or channel has been interacted with. These metrics can be an important measure of your video or channel’s overall popularity.
Mozilla also disagrees, here’s a link to their study and some below articles diving into it
https://www.androidauthority.com/study-youtube-dislike-button-bad-recommendations-3210676/
A Mozilla study found that YouTube’s “dislike” button was ineffective against bad recommendations.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2022/09/20/youtube-dislike-recommendations-mozilla/
…those buttons do little to purge unwanted videos from the personalized recommendations that YouTube feeds to users, according to a study published Tuesday by Mozilla, the foundation behind the Firefox web browser.
For example, using the “Not Interested” button only prevented 11% of recommendations for similar videos, Mozilla said. The “Dislike” button only stopped 12%. The most effective control is the “Don’t recommend this channel” button, which works less than half of the time at 43%.
So…it looks like affirmatively engaging with a video, even with a dislike, is engagement and is unlikely to change what types of content YT feeds you.
Now, from my anecdotal experience, the only way to remove, or reduce, unwanted content categories from your YT feed is a combination of flagging them as not interested AND searching/watching a new category of content to replace it with. Not perfect, but manageable. Oh, and using Piped/proxied services e.g. Newpipe.
Thank you for being you.
I don’t click on it, I have never watched more than 10% of one before scrolling past, I have never commented.
quickly downvote it and skip it
He’s saying that’s the engagement.
I have never watched more than 10%
You gave 10% engagement and voted with your downvote! Double engagement!
From socialvideoplaza.com
You’ve probably heard the myth that dislikes are a form of engagement. And since engagement is the social currency in which YouTube videos are paid, it makes your video perform better in the YouTube rankings. If that information was true in the first place, it is outdated now.
[the dislike button] is used in the algorithm for a couple of things: It is a sign to the algorithm that it should suggest less videos of that creator to the viewer.
Also from socialvideoplaza.com
This site is not a part of the YouTube website or Alphabet. Additionally, this site is not endorsed by YouTube in any way.
Your random quote from a random website doesn’t mean much against the experience of myself and others and how massively disliked videos still get tons of traffic. If you don’t want to see certain content don’t dislike, just keep moving and don’t engage at all. My feed only improved after doing this, when I was disliking videos I kept getting the content I disliked. I didn’t engage and now I don’t see content I don’t want to anymore.
If you’re going to keep posting this same factually incorrect comment, I’ll keep posting my response:
As trustworthy a source as socialvideoplaza.com clearly is…
Google has a different take:
YouTube engagement metrics (views, likes, dislikes, and subscriptions) reflect how many times your YouTube video or channel has been interacted with. These metrics can be an important measure of your video or channel’s overall popularity.
Mozilla also disagrees, here’s a link to their study and some below articles diving into it
https://www.androidauthority.com/study-youtube-dislike-button-bad-recommendations-3210676/
A Mozilla study found that YouTube’s “dislike” button was ineffective against bad recommendations.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2022/09/20/youtube-dislike-recommendations-mozilla/
…those buttons do little to purge unwanted videos from the personalized recommendations that YouTube feeds to users, according to a study published Tuesday by Mozilla, the foundation behind the Firefox web browser.
For example, using the “Not Interested” button only prevented 11% of recommendations for similar videos, Mozilla said. The “Dislike” button only stopped 12%. The most effective control is the “Don’t recommend this channel” button, which works less than half of the time at 43%.
So…it looks like affirmatively engaging with a video, even with a dislike, is engagement and is unlikely to change what types of content YT feeds you.
Now, from my anecdotal experience, the only way to remove, or reduce, unwanted content categories from your YT feed is a combination of flagging them as not interested AND searching/watching a new category of content to replace it with. Not perfect, but manageable. Oh, and using Piped/proxied services e.g. Newpipe.
I get random right and far right posts too.
