X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says

The trip, supposedly for inspecting Olympic facilities even though this was revealed to be impossible due to local conditions, now seems like a gross misappropriation of public funds. This does not sit well with many of us concerned about how our taxes are spent, and there's been a formal complaint by an Anticorruption NGO. [2]

When confronted about this she deflected by pointing out that every year her first trip with her whole team is at Auschwitz, and she accused her detractors of not being willing to go there with her next year. The obvious instrumentalization scandalized the opposition.

[1] https://www.bfmtv.com/paris/interpellee-sur-ses-voyages-anne...

[2] https://www.lequipe.fr/Tous-sports/Actualites/Une-associatio...

If you want to find coverage of the Palestinian position you can read it, and listen/participate in a space.

If you want to find coverage of the Israeli position you can read it, and listen/participate in a space.

To me it says that X is not practicing viewpoint discrimination for this issue which is actually heavily censored in much of legacy media.

"Social media" was a lame attempt to centralise and commercialise forums through surveillance and "advertising services".

Bring back the minitel.

It was a sewer long before Musk took over, that's why the previous owners were so happy to dump it on him, cash out and let him polish that turd

X is what you make it to be. I spend little enough time on it that the small amount of content I do consume from it doesn't offend me.

What I have noticed is the vast amount of criticism of X during the FB Threads rollout. Unsurprisingly, it's dead. Threads has no reason to be immune to the alleged dysfunction that's seen on X. My theory is that it would be no different had it been able to attract sufficient market share.

It always has been for decades, long before Musk bought the company, but again hundreds of millions still use the platform after all the nonsensical predictions of complete shutdown one year ago and the continuing active campaigns to bring it down.

There are much more larger global sewers such as Instagram and TikTok that who's algorithms are much worse than Twitter / X, so let us not believe that this 'global sewage' is exclusive to Twitter / X and especially the words of someone who still needs to clean up their own city.

Of course there is a but coming! When twitter launched, I immediately felt like Twitter itself was a distillation of a fascistic impulse: the idea that a curt and pithy phrase, stripped of nuance, is not only a superior way to communicate, but the only way to communicate. (I'm using "fascistic" here not to incite, but for lack of a better term: I think everyone has an impulse towards the safety of political simplicity, and that modern democracy is founded on complexity, i.e. lots of opinions, lots of checks and balances, lots of persuasive argument required to achieve things). I feel that the very structure of throttled meaning is what made Twitter in particular such a platform for mass outrage and negativity.

Fast foward a decade, and the twitter model of simplicity is now the normal mode of discourse on social media. If something is not a few seconds long, its reach is quite limited. This means that simple things, like propaganda, are easier to articulate, and complex things that acknowledge the subtlety of actual life get buried.

Taken out of political context, a good example is videos of altercations between people (fights, arguments, etc) that become viral. As a viewer, I almost immediately feel outrage and righteous anger against the perceived victim of the altercation. But sometimes some context comes to light: the perceived victim is actually the aggressor, or the situation is much more complicated than it seemed. Putting this back in the political context, I see quick videos getting passed around that do a similar thing: take an event quite out of context in order to manufacture outrage against a particular group. Of course there is a word for this: propaganda.

I'm not a technological doomer: I'm quite intrigued as to what is happening, and my impulse is not to shackle it. But what I'm witnessing is that propaganda (or otherwise, events taken out of context) spread like lightning on social media, and I am sympathetic to attempts by platforms to somehow provide context or moderation to that spread. The mob mentality is real. I share the Mayor's concern about Twitter, because even though it was a sewer from the start, in my estimation, by its platformization of epistemological constraint, the fact that it is walking back attempts to staunch the spread of its own demons is concerning.

I do think a healthy public debate in a functioning, free speech democracy, is essential to its lifeblood. But for that debate to function, it must be done in good faith, and with some shared understanding of truth and context. While I see that happening in some places on social media, it's generally on well moderated forums in which people accept that bad faith arguers will be banned.

Like I said I don't have a clear sense of the solution to all this. State sponsored propaganda was all too effective before social media, and I can see social media undermining the monopoly of the state on the dissemination of that propaganda. But perhaps the pendulum will swing too far to the other side, where blatant bad faith, grassroots propaganda, and untruth successfully steer public opinion.

its just that the nuggets a fewer and far between now and the stream has gotten thinner and slower.

Also he made the team release community notes well ahead of schedule, and this is probably the best feature of Twitter. If that was created in 2017, I probably would still be addict.

I hate twitter , and a lot, specially before Musk, however it is insane to see some people just starting to complain.

Only when finally those who disagree politically with them have a crumb of a voice.

The place was always horrible problem is this people had an elite of horrible "journalists" being yes men and secluding them from divergent voices.