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Comment by hypeit | Hacker News Reader

I stopped using Twitter as soon as Musk bought it precisely for moral reasons. I'm not going to help someone who wrongly accuses people of being pedophiles make more money. There are of course many, many, many other moral reasons to not support Musk but the pedophile incident is so cut and dry that there was moral (non-partisan) reason to bail on day 1 of Musk ownership.

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An argument that someone could make, although maybe it's a bit logically suspect, is that Twitter is losing money for every user, and using Twitter is costing Musk more money than it's generating for him.

So does that imply that to continue to use Twitter is to harm Musk further? If that’s the case it’s zero sum and you’re still benefitting the other users of Twitter.

Doesn't fly. He'll lose more money if there are fewer eyeballs. Users are the metric he uses to attract advertisers.

And if we reflexively block every advertiser the platform shows?

There's competing losses happening here: Marginal operating losses per user which would be realized if I use the app, and "market cap" loss as a result of aggregate loss of users. If substantially fewer people use the app, the company is worth less. ("Market cap" in quotes because it's privately held).

If I were acting in order to maximize losses, I think the latter would be more substantial. It also has the added benefit of not being exposed to the musings of Musk himself and the fascist crowd his reign has attracted to Twitter.

Given how much "X" has put into sandbagging and crippling the logged out user experience, it might make a lot more sense to keep using Twitter but only in logged out views because the signal "X" is sending is that is truly costing them a lot of money they are acting like they can't afford. (It truly is terrible now: no thread views, weird full screen ads, random reCAPTCHAs.)

(I feel like a hipster on this discussion, I stopped using Twitter way back in 2016 before it was cool when I saw it's retweet/quote-tweet tools used to launder targeted misinformation from its terrible personalized ad networks all being abused as a cynical political tool. It was terrible before Musk got involved. "X" is a lot worse, but the downhill started years before, according to this early Twitter adopter.)

I still use Xitter for cross-posting tiktoks. Why not? I don't engage.

Same. plus Tesla.

And who inhumanely tortures animals. [0]

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/neuralink-uc-davis-monkey-photos...

Let me preface everything by saying following your moral compass is good, even if you do it inconsistently, and even if that inconsistency is biased. It is unambiguously better to do something good when motivated, even if you didn't do something that would have been even better, and just as easy for you. In other words, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

In 2019, the Twitter executive for the Middle East, Gordon MacMillan, was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit [1,2]. Despite this revelation, Twitter at the time defended his employment, and did not fire him. I don't know if Musk kept him or not.

The Iraq war (which predates Twitter, but is the kind of operation a Middle East psyops unit would try to sell to the public, and the risk of further US/UK-led wars in the area is high) is responsible for about 460k deaths [3].

But perhaps you were simply unaware, as the story was mostly ignored by the media [4]. Searching "Gordon MacMillan site:url" finds no relevant articles on theguardian.com, bbc.com, bbc.co.uk, nytimes.com, cnn.com, msnbc.com, latimes.com, theatlantic.com, washingtonpost.com, or foxnews.com

[1] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-pa...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-executive-revealed-psyops-s...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

[4] https://fair.org/home/media-ignore-unmasking-of-twitter-exec...

There were always reasons to not use Twitter, which is why I never did.

> In 2019, the Twitter executive for the Middle East, Gordon MacMillan, was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit

Wow, so secret that he listed it on his own LinkedIn profile. His involvement with a psyops group that seems to be little more than a Middle East version of the Ad Council, posting flyers that say "you can be a Muslim and a feminist!" on various social media accounts, it seems. and yet you somehow breathlessly manage to tie this to the death toll of the Iraq war?

> you somehow breathlessly manage to tie this to the death toll of the Iraq war

He is a psyops officer in the army that bombed Iraq. It is not exactly a far-fetched link. As for your assertion that the activities of the psychological warfare unit of the British army are entirely benign.. that's like saying the only purpose of the infantry is to march in parades. It is also not something you would believe for any country that is not currently an ally. Certainly not for China or Russia.

Not defending Elon here but I hope you don't use ig, fb, or any other social media platform because, from data breach to scamming, bad business is being conducted there too.

i don't use any of these for these reasons and other reasons. These leaders have proven they are evil. But perhaps in other cases there is a difference between evil thru general incompetence and evil thru competence.

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