I should add - Musk was almost always the very first post in my feed - I was following him, but had to mute him because he has become such an idiot/extremist. If you followed him over the past 4 years you could really see how someone gets sucked in to extremism through a cycle of bias and affirmation. He was initially cheered on mistly by right wing accounts furious about the Hunter Biden coverup conspiracy and it all devolved from there. Unrestricted free speech is an ugly thing in an environment that Musk created where people are anonymous and there is no content restrictions or real policing of being hateful.
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That last sentence is such an important point to make. Unrestricted free speech is not conducive to a beneficial marketplace of ideas if the individual humans involved do not have equal power. The marketplace devolves to a brand awareness seminar for the most powerful.
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Some of that is a legitimate complaint from those who took over Twitter, that the moderation was overly restrictive to right wing ideas. The failure is that in a functional exchange of free speech, there needs to be personal accountability over what one is saying. That gets lost when someone is anonymous or can post freely without any real consequence (usually financial).
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I have gotten multiple suggestions that I should kill myself on sites with pre-Musk moderation standards. The idea that the internet needs looser moderation is crazy.
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Pre Musk takeover, Twitter was usually a lot of fun for me. They did do some moderation, but calling it “suppressing right wing content” isn’t accurate IMO unless you consider white supremacy, hate speech, misinformation, and death threats “right wing”. Nobody ever got moderated for discussing lower taxes, smaller government, or Christian values.
The President’s experience is very similar to mine. Elon let the hate merchants come back, and became a misinformation spreader himself where his drivel was super boosted and pushed out to everyone. He amplified all accounts that paid him, and super amplified those that paid him and agreed with his ideology. It was no free speech haven, but rather became a misinformation megaphone.
Conservatives can join Bluesky. I won’t block anyone for espousing conservative values there, although I’m sure many will. The platform itself won’t either, but they will block hate merchants. I will also liberally block white supremacists and hate speech, but so far I have not blocked a single account on Bluesky. The “conservatives” that I’ve seen show up in others feeds so far generally are trolls that came over to scream at someone rather than have a conversation.
Bluesky is a public benefit corporation. They give the user a lot of power in terms of feed customization and tools to beat back trolls. The trolls absolutely hate it.
Right now there are no ads, but I think they have to be coming at some point as this company needs to make money somehow. They probably aren’t burning tons of cash yet, as I think they are still a staff of 20-ish people supporting 20 million plus users.
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Twitter was helpful in medical circles in the acute phase of the pandemic, whether sharing treatment information or trying to find facilities to transfer patients to (the latter still seems crazy to me).
I used to enjoy Twitter by finally deactivated my account and deleted the app. There are some accounts I followed on Twitter that aren’t on Bluesky (yet) with weather info but have bot accounts to post messages. I haven’t done much with Bluesky yet.
I think those things you mentioned were most of the moderation, but they jumped all over how hunter Biden was handled as the public story about big tech influencing elections.
The irony of course is musks blatant interference in 2024 that followed.
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Yes, in hindsight they did overreach on suppressing that story. I think it was with good intentions on not allowing misinformation to influence the election, but they should have allowed some legit info to be shared. Not allowing Hunter dick pics is still fine, but they shouldn’t have put a lid on the story as much as they did.
And yes, it’s ironic that Musk broadcast and amplified misinformation 24/7 on Twitter for things he liked, and throttled views on anything he didn’t like.
The moderation on Twitter of things that Musk dislikes is heavier today than what was done to the right previously. You can’t even say “cis”.
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i don’t know why i’m following this thread, i have never had a Twitter account, nor X, nor BlueSky. I guess i’m just here for the shitshow.
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I’m just here trying to get others to get off of them. And to get those clouds off my lawn.
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Here’s an example of Musk throttling. 55M people follow the NYT on Twitter. However when a major story is posted not many get to see it as Musk throttles them. On Bluesky NYT has less than 1M followers but gets much more engagement as it’s not throttled (and not boosted either I think).
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Musk also now throttles any post with a link. He wants all content to be on his platform where he can monetize it. Actual authors of materials should not be able to link to their sites.
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He is targeting anybody who is pro-Palestinian.
That account posts stories on what is happening on the ground in Gaza and West Bank.
Agree that he is doing this by design now. Not much point in posting on X anymore because Musk will keep doing that.
People will leave to Threads and Bluesky.
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We had conservative talk radio.
Fox news took it to tv.
It seems “X” is now taking it to social media.
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Yes.
It looks like it will be:
X 50%
Threads 30%
Bluesky 20%
Could get worse for Musk if he keeps being a dick.
China worried about growth of Bluesky, as it does not have an easy to manipulate algorithm and they already spent a lot of effort on Twitter misinformation
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Bluesky is going to be bigger than Threads. A lot of the major social media creators are going to bluesky instead of threads, and where they go, the rest will follow.
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I’ve been thinking about it phonetically as bluuusky all this time, just realized its pronounced blue sky 
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