Once upon a time, you had Twitter to distribute new, opinions and other stuff you wanted to share. I joined quite late, in 2016, and used the app mostly to share technical conferences I joined. Once I started writing books, I used the platform to announce my books. Later, after The Deep was published and the actual sabotage took place, I published links to the news articles combined with a comment and a link to my book.

Then Elon came along…

Shortly after Musk purchased the Tweet company, it became clear to everyone, or at least to me, that Twitter would be steering clear of any forms of redaction and censorship, and promote what Elon describes as ‘free speech’. Which is basically anything anyone had to say, whether it had any relation with the truth (a hard-defined subject), was insulting to either individuals or groups of individuals, or lacked any form of good manners. All of that was aborted when Musk rolled up the departments in charge of content control. I stuck around only shortly after that to see if there would be improvements, there were none. And with that, the time to leave Twitter had come for me. It was early 2023.

Was censorship and content control really a requirement you may ask? In an ideal world: no. But it had been proven that the use and misuse of Twitter had the capability to alter the election results of sovereign nations and influence the perception of reality for large groups of supporters of established political parties. Surely that’s not what you want a social media platform to do?

But with the Musk-induced demise of Twitter, I feel another platform to replace it is needed. I haven’t found it yet but I keep looking. Of course, Meta responded with Threads, but this is not available in the EU due to the expected infringement of the GDPR privacy legislation. For the time being, I stick to Facebook to promote whatever I got to promote, including my books. You can find me here.

As to Twitter, or X as it has been recently renamed, I assume the following will happen:

• It will see a significant drop in subscribers
• The platform will tangent the reputation of the truth social app from former failed prez trump (small t intentionally)
• Add buying customers will leave the platform
• The market value will further decrease

 

Paul, 2023-08