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Comment by skhunted | Hacker News Reader

When Twitter enforced their policies on Trump and other right wing posters Republicans complained about “mainstream” media manipulating elections by suppressing their messaging. Those people ought to be consistent and decry Musks’ shenanigans.

What is interesting to me is that the a great many established accounts on Twitter would love to leave the platform due to it being owned by Musk. They don’t/can’t/haven’t left Twitter due to network effects. How long these users remain on Twitter is a measure of the power of Twitter’s entrenched position. The only real policy on Twitter is whatever Musk wants at a given time. No one should expect consistency in policy enforcement on Twitter.

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> Those people ought to be consistent

They are extremely consistent in being extremely dishonest.

Every accusation made by the right is a confession.

The ones complaining about media manipulation are the ones manipulating the media.

The ones complaining about coups and violence are the ones attempting coups and committing violence.

The ones complaining about rigged elections are the ones rigging the elections.

The ones complaining about pedophiles and groomers are the ones committing those acts.

Every time. Every. Single. Time.

I call bullshit. Anybody can leave Twitter and Facebook at any time. Some don’t only because they don’t know how to operate otherwise. That ignorance is not evidence of platform dominance.

The evidence is that there are lots of people who despise Musk and what he has done to Twitter who still use it. That's what speaks to it's dominance and speaks to the network effects it has.

People said the same stupid things several years ago about Facebook. That is still not evidence of either dominance or vendor lock-in. Its just evidence of either addiction or ignorance of alternatives.

To be clear dominance is where one player owns market majority. That is not Twitter. There is lots of evidence on this. Twitter might dominate Truth Social but it still lags far behind Facebook, TikTok, and probably Instagram.

Vendor lock-in is where the cost to switch to an alternative is supremely expensive, such as rebuilding infrastructure from the ground up. That is radically different than the stupidity of not knowing what your options are.

Too many smart, savvy people who despise Musk stay on the platform for it to be believable that stupidity is the reason.

Non sequitur. Your reasoning is that something must be valid because otherwise stupid things cannot possibly be stupid if reasoned by supposedly smart people. That doesn't make sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy

That is not my reasoning. You believe people who despise Musk stay on Twitter because they are too stupid to know of alternatives. You assert this to be true. I believe the reason is something different. We have two opposing beliefs. Neither of us has proof. I believe objective observers will conclude that my reasoning is more likely to be correct. Your belief that it is stupidity that causes people to not go to an alternative platform is not credible is my opinion.

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