Tech journalism mainstays are feebly rationalizing their return to a broken, billionaire-run right-wing propaganda website.
I find it endlessly entertaining watching journalists conduct flimsy but elaborate justifications as to why they still use X (formerly Twitter), a right wing propaganda sewer owned by an overt white supremacist directly responsible for the death of what ultimately may be millions of human beings. Quick reminder: Elon Musk is an unremarkable and virulent racist who cosplays as a supergenius engineer. He leveraged the money he lucked into at Paypal to opportunistically glom onto actual innovators and take singular credit for their work while consistently cutting corners in ways that put human lives at risk. There's bottomless evidence he doesn't know how anything works, yet has found unsurprising financial success in a country being devoured alive by artifice.In 2022, butthurt from growing public and journalistic criticism of his bottomless violations of labor rights, environmental law, civil rights, and public safety protections, Musk bought Twitter and immediately turned the platform into a safe space for assholes, bigots, cryptocurrency scammers, right wing zealots, and trolls. Musk quickly set to work tweaking the social media website's algorithms specifically to ensure his ego was adequately coddled and to force-feed users a steady diet of right wing agitprop (one study found that just two-months' worth of new Twitter use was enough to drive a person ideologically rightward).Musk fired 6,000 employees, refusing to give many of them severance. And despite his virulently-racist anti-immigration rhetoric (despite being an illegal immigrant himself), he overloaded and worked his remaining H-1B visa employees (who couldn't quit without risk of deportation) into the ground. Recognizing the quickly-devolving nature of the diseased website and its pudding-brained owner, many journalists around that time wisely decided to leave Twitter entirely, abandoning a platform that had, until then, become a centralized hub for lightning-fast journalistic conversation and debate. Musk, meanwhile, proceeded to purchase an autocracy, used his new platform to seed 2024 election disinformation, and subsequently began murdering people en masse via DOGE's dismantling of global relief programs the Musk cult was neither empathic nor ethical enough to understand.
