It was apparently Twitter’s suspension of the Babylon Bee for transphobia that inspired billionaire manbaby Elon Musk to put in a bid for the social media company in the first place. Now Musk has completed his mission at Twitter, such as it was, announcing today that he has restored the account of the terminally unfunny “satire” site, as well as that of Canadian fusspot psychologist Jordan Peterson, who had also been suspended for a transphobic tweet.
The slight irony is that, as Musk restores the “free speech” of these two (as well as that of comedian Kathy Griffin), the site itself is nearing collapse as a result of his own obstinately stupid behavior as Twitter CEO, or “Chief Twit,” as he puts it. If the site, which has seen a vast exodus of employees in the last few days and which is now basically running on fumes, ultimately implodes, it will effectively shut down the speech of millions of Twitter users who have come to rely on the site–including, of course, Peterson and the Bee.
Also, he’s been banning people who make fun of him–and firing them, if they work at Twitter. And today, he announced that he would shadowban anyone whose tweets are too negative for his tastes. So free speech.
The mood on Twitter is alternately giddy and mournful, as longtime users alternate between mocking Musk and lamenting the seemingly impending collapse of the site that brought them real-time news and funny commentary and, in some cases, jobs and friends and even spouses. Hell, I probably would have seen my last pledge drive fail — which would have shut down the site — had it not been for the publicity a couple of high-profile Twitter accounts gave it.
Musk has destroyed the whole thing because he got mad that a dopey far-right satire site got suspended — not even banned, just suspended — for transphobia.
This is why we shouldn’t have billionaires at all. Tax the tuck out of them all.
I’m moving to Mastodon, by the way, at @[email protected].
Follow me on Mastodon.
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Tax? You’re aiming low. We should do a bit of good old fashioned expropriation. They steal our wealth, we may as well consider stealing it back for once.
When Grimes left him for a trans woman, he went even further off the edge of hate.
Don’t know if people have seen this. This came out in discovery in the legal case. It’s a schedule of text messages between Musk and his ex-missus (^2).
It’s ironic perhaps that MRAs claim men only do stuff to impress women. Well, in this case that might be true. In fairness, I did once shimmy up a lamppost for a lass (it made sense in context), but I draw the line at blowing $44 billion. You just have to make do with chocolates or something.
“We hunted the mammoth and we harnessed the Mastodon.” I like it.
(I’ve patted myself on the back for years because I’ve been able to stay the heck away from Twitter, but I still like it.)
Aw, Space Karen got his fee-fees hurt.
I hope the racists and fascists enjoy the next week or two that the site remains up since all the people who actually keep the nuts and bolts running were either fired or resigned when asked to work insane hours, but not when or what on, or … anything other than take a loyalty oath to him. Presumably there are plenty of young stupid (mostly incels, probably) who theoretically would fit into the jobs and would love to worship him for half the salary and all the abuse, but the people who had the actual tech savvy and institutional knowledge are gone now.
I imagine the sound of Twitter’s stock price falling to be Wile E. Coyote going off a cliff, with the little “poof” at the end.
@David: I have finally taken the plunge and signed up for Mastodon. All the cool kids are going there, and if the non-cool kids do too, at least they’ll be on another server, right?
There seem to be lots of activists for good things there, so yay.
Proud to say I never had Twitter. I’m sticking with the furry Elephantiformes.
@GSS
If Twitter survives Sunday, I’ll be shocked. Twitter has canned most of its engineering staff. With a full team working around the clock last time, they could barely keep the site running and there were prolonged outages.
What happened? The World Cup Soccer(Football).
I fully expect Twitter to collapse this time. Then Elon will pitch a huge hissy fit, put someone competent in charge, then crawl into his money hole to cry.
@Milotha. Man, I thought that was some weird trans dig, but she’s actually dating Chelsea Manning!! Hooray for Grimes for hooking up with someone with courage and decency.
I’m @Starlady on Mastodon.
I haven’t deleted my Twitter account because a) I’m not leaving the Nazi’s a clear run and b) As a self-published writer I went to a lot of trouble to get 3,100 twitter followers and it’s depressing to think of starting again from scratch. But it seems like a good idea to get a Mastodon account and try to find at least some people before Twitter implodes.
@Sheila: Announce your Mastodon to your followers regularly. You never know when Twit is going down permanently, so best to have a backup plan in place for when you do have to flee. Or your followers flee.
@Natsume: It’s working fine right now, but the matches are long over. So I guess there are just barely enough server guys to keep it running… so far. And the former guy who was in that department gives it “only” a 50% chance of crashing during the Cup, so hey, they might luck out.
Meanwhile, in traditional news, the BBC skipped the opening ceremony/ad for the host country, and instead presented a programme of various commentators listing all the terrible things about Qatar and FIFA. Jolly good, Auntie Beeb. (They will be showing the actual games, because duh)
And just to hammer in the final nail, Musk has apparently now also reinstated Trump. Dun dun dun …
I saw a video today of Peterson tweets read by Skeletor from the He-Man cartoon.
@ SpecialFFrog
I had to look that up, which was kind of funny, though the funniest part to me was someone in the comments pointing out that He-Man must be especially upsetting to Skeletor because he has his pronouns right in his name.
Then that led to a video of Picard owning Peterson over the viewscreen. It works surprisingly well, with Picard looking exasperated while he rants about woke moralists
@Frog: That’s genuinely funny.
@.45: His pronoun’s right there up front! You can’t address him without it! Totally woke!
Apparently there are at least a few prominent people not getting back in. The biggest complaint among RW types is that this includes Alex Jones.