African Musk: Not a Fragrance

[broncofan]

Broncofan, on the one hand I can understand the need people have to constantly challenge the Neo-Nazis, or just Nazis since I am not sure what is Neo about them. On the other hand, it seems futile to me because with very few exceptions, they never listen to an alternative argument and never change. There have been some instances of change, in the UK the case of Ray Hill is particularly important and you may have heard of him (link to his obituary below), but on the whole I think your mental health is going to suffer if you are constantly on the front line of a media war you cannot win.

Again, it is up to those who control the 'system' to be responsible about this. Age old, debunked theories of Race are not news, they are not even opinion but iron-clad dogma as irretrievable as Flat Earth fanatics. The hate embedded in their discourse disqualifies it from being valued, so unless Musk can defend his editorial decisions, I think the shareholders should get rid of him, if that is possible.

Ray Hill-
Former neo-nazi Ray Hill who brought down Leicester's far-right movement dies aged 82 - Leicestershire Live (leicestermercury.co.uk)

You're exactly right. I have to admit it was not super smart or good for me to engage with these people. It didn't help anyone either....

[broncofan]

https://twitter.com/ADL/status/1650577100917596207

This is a good example. I didn't used to see responses like this under tree of life tweets. The other one mentioned Israel but this is just a Tree of Life tweet. They could easily get rid of the ghouls stalking that account and they did a bit more than a year ago or for some reason they weren't really there.

This is a tweet about the Tree of Life synagogue in 2021. https://twitter.com/ADL/status/1453345829671026689?s=20

[broncofan]

I'm sorry about my posts in this thread. I had a bit too much time on my hands and messed up the thread a bit.

[filghy2]

On the other hand, it seems futile to me because with very few exceptions, they never listen to an alternative argument and never change.

In fact, they thrive on creating diversions and provoking emotional reponses. Like all trolls, their aim if to gain applause from like-minded people and annoy the other side.

[filghy2]

That's interesting. There are two differences I notice. One is in the "for you" tab on the left that refreshes the timeline. The "followers" tab is exactly the same and I use it but it took me a second to figure out that I was always on the "for you" tab which I think it defaults to.

I think the difference may be that I've been going straight to the twitter pages I'm interested in, which don't have a "For you" tab. I only see that if I go to the twitter home page, and it's a bunch of really random stuff. Interestingly, the top of the "Who to follow" list on that page is Tucker Carlson.

[broncofan]

I think the difference may be that I've been going straight to the twitter pages I'm interested in, which don't have a "For you" tab. I only see that if I go to the twitter home page, and it's a bunch of really random stuff. Interestingly, the top of the "Who to follow" list on that page is Tucker Carlson.

That's a healthy way to use twitter. That's not how a lot of twitter addicts use it. I click the home button mindlessly and scroll whatever pops up. It reminds me of that Sarah Palin interview where she was asked what newspapers she reads and she said "whatever they put in front of me."

I realize some of my tweets in this thread were pointless. I was as they say on the right, slightly triggered by some folks. I shut down my twitter account until Monday, when I'll be well rested to start getting irritated all over again.

[filghy2]

The trick with social media is to make sure you use it for your purposes, rather than letting the platforms use you for their purposes. Don't get sucked into the outrage generation machine.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe5641

How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks

Abstract
Moral outrage shapes fundamental aspects of social life and is now widespread in online social networks. Here, we show how social learning processes amplify online moral outrage expressions over time. In two preregistered observational studies on Twitter (7331 users and 12.7 million total tweets) and two preregistered behavioral experiments (N = 240), we find that positive social feedback for outrage expressions increases the likelihood of future outrage expressions, consistent with principles of reinforcement learning. In addition, users conform their outrage expressions to the expressive norms of their social networks, suggesting norm learning also guides online outrage expressions. Norm learning overshadows reinforcement learning when normative information is readily observable: in ideologically extreme networks, where outrage expression is more common, users are less sensitive to social feedback when deciding whether to express outrage. Our findings highlight how platform design interacts with human learning mechanisms to affect moral discourse in digital public spaces.

[Stavros]

There are no tricks here -just vacate the space. It might be because of my age, but I have never seen the point of Twitter other than as an instant news feed for politics and commerce. At one time there were multiple alt.this groups, then yahoo groups and like myspace they have all gone. By the time of their demise they had become flooded with spam and I don't see how Musk can maintain Twitter in its original form if he refuses to exert any editorial control over the content.

I suppose there has always been a deep well of abuse but most of the time we never heard it or read it, but I do think since Murdoch took over UK newspapers in the late 1960s he has nurtured a culture of vulgarity, complaint, grievance and abuse to stir up 'the people' against the Government and the State. He loathes both, and to detach the people from their Govt he needs to prove that politicians are permanent liars and frauds, but has also selected people in sport and entertainment to be targets of ridicule and abuse, even if, as Hugh Grant now claims, it means breaking the law through burglaries, phone hacking, stalking and so on. In any previous incarnation of democracy and the rule of law, Murdoch in the UK would have been declared unfit to own a media company and banned.

Once Murdoch established abuse as a norm, the rest piled in. This is different from Satire, such as is used in the UK by the weekly paper Private Eye, or on tv in the 1960s by a programme on the BBC called That Was The Week That Was. At the time, it was rare to see politicians lampooned at all -but there was no malice involved, although Private Eye for some time has been a vehicle for Govt disinformation, conspiracy theories and questionable ethics. Satire if done properly can always be seen for what it is, whereas with Murdoch there is dark, malevolent project at work, and I think Musk is part of the loop that regard politics with contempt and Markets as greater than God.

Finally this: all these hymns to individual liberty, orchestrated by men who want you to conform to their version of Markets, their version of Freedom, their version of Free Speech. But other Versions are available, if only we had the power to bring them to the centre stage where they belong.

[broncofan]

There are no tricks here -just vacate the space. It might be because of my age, but I have never seen the point of Twitter other than as an instant news feed for politics and commerce.

I agree with your post but I want to add why I think twitter has been very popular. The best way to use it is to just find what you're looking for on there and move on but that's a responsible use. It sucks people in because you can constantly refresh it to keep being fed things that will feed your outrage/intrigue meter and can be a kind of mindless entertainment akin to dumping coins in a slot machine to get 90% of your money back.

Every once in a while it is an incredible app for schadenfreude on a mass scale and is the most fun when there's a scandalous report of some kind or some jerk has embarrassed themselves. On those nights it's a place where you can hear the laughter of 10,000 "friends". Ted Cruz liking cuckold porn or Kurt Eichenwald posting a screenshot that showed a trove of tentacle porn, which he tried to explain in a way that was worse than if he just said he enjoys seeing illustrated octopae have sex. The scandals don't always involve men accidentally revealing what porn they like but sometimes people say incredibly dumb, hypocritical things and it does feel like you can laugh at their hypocrisy and gullibility in real time.

Here is what's bad about it in addition to what you said. When something is revealed that supports some bias, you refresh your page and interact with those who agree, but the demand for actual news becomes greater than the supply. The supply is bottlenecked by things that actually happen. You can't make more things happen by refreshing your page. So, you can probably figure out what people do. Eventually you see a tweet that there are 50,000 ballots in a dumpster with a Chinese shipping receipt and nobody bothers to ask what that means or consider that it's definitely false. And the debate that Musk brought was that twitter shouldn't be legislating what's true. But it is a system that rewards confabulation and benefits from it so of course it should.

[broncofan]

The trick with social media is to make sure you use it for your purposes, rather than letting the platforms use you for their purposes. Don't get sucked into the outrage generation machine.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe5641

How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks

Abstract
Moral outrage shapes fundamental aspects of social life and is now widespread in online social networks. Here, we show how social learning processes amplify online moral outrage expressions over time. In two preregistered observational studies on Twitter (7331 users and 12.7 million total tweets) and two preregistered behavioral experiments (N = 240), we find that positive social feedback for outrage expressions increases the likelihood of future outrage expressions, consistent with principles of reinforcement learning. In addition, users conform their outrage expressions to the expressive norms of their social networks, suggesting norm learning also guides online outrage expressions. Norm learning overshadows reinforcement learning when normative information is readily observable: in ideologically extreme networks, where outrage expression is more common, users are less sensitive to social feedback when deciding whether to express outrage. Our findings highlight how platform design interacts with human learning mechanisms to affect moral discourse in digital public spaces.

That's really interesting. What's worrying is that if the each group consensus forms around various falsehoods it's difficult to convince people they're wrong within the social media framework. And if the app captures a lot of people's attention, it becomes much tougher to get people to hear you outside of it. Not only does it capture people's attention but it probably in the long run shortens their attention span for more demanding types of discourse and thought.