Elon Musk polls whether Assange and Snowden should be pardoned

twitter.com

3 points·danuker··5 comments

Elon is increasing Twitter usage and registration with these ‘controversial’ polls. An acquaintance of mine (a non-speaker of English) who never had or used Twitter has now opened an account. I believe others in his milieu have also done so. I think Elon’s billion user prediction is achievable.

So a slicker variation on basic SEO/engagement tricks, like asking "Are cats better than dogs?"

My other observation: it seems to be straying into vaguely politically-themed topics. Maybe that's also a byproduct of our algorithm-driven age: that charged topics hook people. It just surprises me, because it seems unnecessary. And also a little ill-advised, since taking one side over the other is a classic zero-sum game.

All news outlets today have clickbait; it is unavoidable.

Equating a poll about the prosecution & persecution of two historically important figures who exposed serious criminal misconduct by the US state (one a non-US journalist, the other a US American whistleblower) with a completely subjective and yes, clickbaity question such as "Are cats better than dogs?" is highly disingenuous. One is a matter for serious legal, ethical and political debate; the other quite clearly not.

All these elon stories all the time has gotten very tiresome.

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