or, here me out, people are just sick of it? They don't care that their masters are sniffing eachothers ai powered farts to keep the economy afloat on the promise of their obsolescence. Sure, in theory it could be good for them, they can get more work done quickly, but why would they be kept alive if their owners no longer need to rely on them. The ideal business has no expenses, workers are one of those. Combine that with everything being shit nowadays, yeah, I can't blame whoever did this
People are apathetic at this point. When a large amount of americans can barely afford to live while threatened with replacement while the economy booms on the backs of their claimed obsolescence, they don't care that a billionaire could've gotten hurt, especially when that billionaire is working against their interests.
> People should demand a new deal and lobby for that.
Lol, really? You think there is any chance of that happening in this current political climate? Any whisper at all of rights for workers is immediately shot down as Godless Communist rhetoric.
is there a similar thing for GPUs? I want to build a workstation and have it work on freebsd but would prefer to use an intel arc card which has no information about freebsd compatibility online
not anymore. People are acting like they're leaving everything and moving to bluesky or fedi when in reality they already exist there and many other places and are simply leaving the braindead one
knowing how xorg currently operates (it doesn't, it has a successor) it'd be a wayland protocol negotiated over dbus and mainly opposed by the GNOME people
ad hominem.
but whatever, lets suppose trump and elon aren't fascists.
what exactly do fascists do?
Oppression of minorities? Check
Capitalism as the main apparatus of the state? Check
Imprisoning dissenting voices? Check
Creating lists of people to get rid of? Check
Authoritarianism? Double check
Creating an out group and scapegoating it as an "enemy from within" Check
if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it doesn't have to scream it's a duck and sieg heil to be sure it's probably a duck or at least not a swan
There have been a lot of political prosecutions of people who disagree. James Comey, Leticia James, John Bolton, Mark Kelly. Luckily, grand juries and judges have prevented them from getting convictions. But dragging them through the legal process is punishment enough. The administration's incompetence at imprisoning political opponents isn't a reason to forgive them.
ICE has targeted protestors, and Rubio made it clear the targeting was intentional policy.
If we look beyond "imprisonment" and include "illegally or unfairly punish dissenting voices to keep them from having a voice," there are a lot more victims. Jimmy Kimmel, reporters at the Pentagon, openly supporting an ally's takeover of Warner Brothers to control CNN.
> [group of people] are evil and don't deserve to be happy"
Most of the times I’ve seen such statements on Twitter, the [group of people was one of: men, white people, straight people, cisgender people. Something tells me those statements were not made by conservatives…
One of their posts that they themselves link is supporting abortion. I am not sure how abortion connects with my right to not disclose information about myself or digital rights.
so... fighting for the exact kind of freedom they've fought for since day 1? Being against illegal invasions of privacy means being against it even when it becomes beneficial to prosecuting child murder
freedom is intersectional. it's hard to fight for freedom while supporting those that actively limit the freedom of others, especially when the amount of impressions are no longer worth doing it for
I’m pretty sure it doesn’t fit with the founders intention.
“We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
Apparently X.com doesn’t fit in that world anymore.
What exactly has Elon done to limit your freedom? For me, Elon has increased my freedom because I can read about certain viewpoints that were previously censored on Twitter.
He ran DOGE and illegally destroyed science and arts funding across the US government. [0] He continues to interfere in elections, committing what is likely fraud. He silences viewpoints that disagree with him on twitter and routinely interferes with grok’s training to promote his own viewpoints.
Oh and he begged to visit Epstein’s child sex slavery island. [2]
I get that your moral compass might not be fully functional, but I draw the line at fascism, treason, and pedophilia.
If we step back from the anecdotal arguments in this thread and look at the actual metrics and independent studies, the "pre-Musk vs. post-Musk" reality is pretty unambiguous.
Regarding government censorship, Twitter's pre-Musk transparency reports consistently showed them complying with roughly half of government takedown requests, and they frequently fought overly broad demands in court. Under Musk, data compiled by Rest of World showed that compliance jumped to over 80% (specifically 83% in his first six months), heavily favoring takedown requests from authoritarian-leaning governments.
On the topic of algorithmic amplification, y'all argue about whether boosting one side equals censoring the other. Setting the semantics aside, a 2023 Nature study found that X's "For You" algorithm demonstrably amplifies conservative content and steers users toward conservative accounts at a much higher rate than a chronological feed, while actively demoting traditional media.
As for moderation and toxicity, the claim that discussing certain topics would automatically get you banned usually ignored that it was generally the manner of the discussion (ie targeted harassment) rather than the topics themselves that triggered enforcement pre-Musk. Post-acquisition, a 2025 PLOS One audit found that measurable hate speech increased by roughly 50%, alongside a significant spike in user engagement with that specific content.
Finally, there's the issue of transparency itself. We used to get highly detailed, bi-annual reports that tracked exact volumes of rule enforcement. Those were abruptly paused, and the reports that eventually resumed are heavily stripped down, omitting comprehensive metrics on things like spam and platform manipulation.
TL;DR: The data suggests that while you are less likely to get banned by US-centric moderation for controversial cultural takes, the platform is demonstrably more compliant with state-sponsored censorship, less transparent about its operations, and algorithmically tuned to amplify right-leaning content.
I don’t think your argument holds, or at least, there is missing data. We have a different administration now, and I suspect it significantly reduced the number takedown requests, maybe by an order of magnitude. I would expect that the remaining requests are for unambiguous legal issues and therefore have a higher rate of granting them.
It's not available to new users (I think there is a "karma" threshold but not sure about the exact number) and you need to to a direct link to the comment (e.g. click the time in the comment header) to see the option.
I mean any conservative view points? Immigration, DEI policies, euthanasia, pro life, gender roles, trans sexuality..
Discuss any of these on Twitter would get you banned, until Musk took over. It still does on many left leaning platforms, including Youtube, Twitch, BlueSky, etc.
HN is the only platform I've participated in that tends to allow opposing view points (albeit more left leaning).
If EFF wants to declare that it's now a Left leaning activist entity and doesn't like to engage wit other people, that's fine, I'd rather they just say that instead and be honest.
You can discuss all of those things just fine, both now and then. I have, and never got banned for any of them.
The problem is online/MAGA conservatives don't want to discuss those things. I've never talked to any online conservative who had anything new or interesting to say about any of those things.
No ‘a man can never be a woman’ is a fact and mainstream view. Disliking your sex isn't an innate characteristic and you have no right to force others to believe your illusion or participate in your gender performance.
More to the point you just claimed discussion of these matters wasn’t ever suppressed and then attempted to suppress discussion of them by claiming this was bigoted.
People with gender dysphoria exist. THey are not marginalised: they have the same rights as every other person has. It is not bigotry to not participate in their gender performance, because gender performance is not an innate characteristic, as already mentioned to you in the comment you're replying to.
"freedom is intersectional" is a fancy way of saying "I only support freedom for people I agree with." and the impressions line at the end is basically admitting it was never about principles, it was about clout. you didn't leave the platform because of ethics, you left because the algorithm stopped paying you for it.
>"freedom is intersectional" is a fancy way of saying "I only support freedom for people I agree with."
That is the exact opposite of what that means. It means freedom should be supported for all, especially for the oppressed. Those who stand for oppression in one way serve to benefit other forms of oppression
What? Freedom of association implicitly means freedom not to associate. It is not at all incompatible with freedom to say, "I don't want to hang out with those guys because they suck."
I believe in freedom of speech for people that I don't want to talk to. There is no contradiction in that.
that's fair, but nobody here was arguing you can't leave. the point is that the original post framed leaving as some grand moral act of defending intersectional freedom when it's just choosing not to hang out somewhere. you're allowed to do that. just don't dress it up as activism.
Universality of human rights is a great principle that breaks down horribly the moment it makes contact with people who do not want you to have those rights. Like, even if you're a single-issue free speech maximalist, it is entirely self-defeating to argue that censorious tyrants should be afforded the benefits of free speech. The only purpose tyrants have of free speech is to use it to amass power to destroy free speech.
And yes, to be clear, Elon Musk is a censorious tyrant. All the big tech leaders are, both because some of them started out as outright fascists and because the rules of the tech CEO game are, in the Nash equilibrium, unfavorable to liberal ideals.
Dehumanization is another common tactic of tyrants. You look at the group of dissidents you want to censor, identify those who are weak enough to silence, and use your control over society and government to make them pay for not being on their side. Rinse and repeat until you've salami-sliced away every dissident's rights. The only effective means of stopping dehumanization is to render it ineffective by making lots of friends who understand and defend against these attacks. [0] The interminably dense social justice literature uses jargon terms like "solidarity" and "intersectionality", which seem almost calculated to piss off the unenlightened into reflexively opposing social justice because we might as well be wizards chanting Latin curses at people to sound smart. But the idea is simple.
So yes, freedom is intersectional - because it it ultimately comes from the people as a whole exercising their power to check the power of tyrants.
[0] "Apes together strong", in case HN doesn't render emoji correctly.
"the only purpose tyrants have of free speech is to use it to destroy free speech" says who? you? so you get to read minds now, know exactly why someone wants to speak, and preemptively decide they don't deserve to? that's just you picking winners not defending free speech
and you didn't call every tech CEO a fascist but you did call them all censorious tyrants who operate against liberal ideals. which is a fun thing to say on a website where you're freely saying it. if the tyrants are this bad at tyranny maybe they're not actually tyrants.
I think that's the point. The owner of X as well as most of the remaining denizens are actively working on taking away the freedom of others to believe in their own views and make them adhere to their beliefs.
so the argument is that someone is so influential their tweets are basically mind control, but also you need to leave the platform to stop them? if musk is that powerful, your absence from x isn't doing anything. and if he's not that powerful, then you're just mad about a guy you disagree with having a big megaphone.
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