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.
