So you lost some Twitter followers, and now mean people are talking shit at you. At least you're not having bombs falling from the sky in your neighborhood. And you're not in prison for criticizing dictators. And you're not little more than a baby, getting shot to death in your elementary school.
Assuming (for the sake of the argument) that 44 billion US dollars is an awful lot of money no matter how rich one might be, how would it be worth buying Twitter if the goal were not to somehow make money off it? That is, in the short term, one could cope with losses in anticipation of long-term financial benefit, but if the thing goes under completely, how can a purchase of $44 BILLION be justified?
As someone pointed out, Twitter has brought lots of people together in many ways on a global scale. And whatever one can say about that in a critique (for instance, Western affluence affords greater access than that experienced by most of the people of Africa), it's simply true that I've been able to follow events in the Philippines and other places by following accounts from there, and even in less open countries by following human rights and journalistic and political opposition accounts. (And it's not all happy discoveries, either. Some of our friends in Hong Kong were very open to right-wing ideas – evidently, due to the PRC carrying the label "Communist" and their taking its ideological verities seriously.)
But while it would be a shame to lose opportunities to draw attention to Russia's War on Ukraine, how much impact have various Twitter campaigns had on the political situations inside certain countries? If one is inclined to say "very little," Turlough's point may strike at the heart of the matter. The ruling powers in Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Turkey, and so on, could be extremely uneasy at the continued prospect of a global network of humans no longer limited to having to "Think Globally, Act Locally." Why would various agencies try to disrupt such platforms (and their inhabitants) if they feared nothing from that direction? And as they've had their intelligence services attack and infiltrate those platforms to disrupt them in many ways, it would obviously benefit them to have a useful idiot to serve the same goal, especially if one says he's going to do things for positive reasons (like "liberating free speech").
But that's only for public consumption, yes? We can now see that the "positive reasons" are limited to a specific ideological stance (called "libertarian" – seemingly, more individualistic, but fringe right-wing in the US) with no objections to white supremacy and other ideas held dear in Far Right circles. And that's also in keeping with what various governments would like to see, whether only in shit-stirring, or in encouraging extensive social conflict, or in installations of friendly regimes like the one in the United States from 2017 to 2021. To some of us, all this doesn't seem so complicated. Turning Twitter into an updated, normalized version of 4chan or The Daily Stormer would serve both to "get the [Far Right] word out" as well as eventually destroy the "threat" that the platform represented all along.
