My predictions: Twitter will be the first of the social media Old Guard to collapse. Facebook will be the second. What follows will be a war of sorts between decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Diaspora and centralized, though "free speech focused" platforms like BitChute, Minds and Gab. They will probably split along political lines (Mastodon and Diaspora lean mostly left; MGB, right), and they're pretty evenly matched, so I don't know who's going to win; it may tie pretty closely to the political situation of the next four to eight years.
@4of92000 Self-inflicted demises. Twitter committing fully to fascism, Facebook’s major failures with privacy and other issues, they will probably blame outside factors but it will be their own fault.
They probably won’t die off completely, just hang around without the level of impact of their heyday.
@doctornovakaine "Twitter committing fully to fascism"?
I was more concerned about the opposite problem; Jack Dorsey's straight-up said his office leans left.
@4of92000 Not in the slightest. Jack reinstated Richard Spencer, a known Neo-Nazi, and Alex Jones, an alt-right figurehead. And now Twitter is hijacking accounts and adding likes on them to tweets from Trump and other alt-righters to force the dissemination of their viewpoint. That is straight-up fascism.
@doctornovakaine
There's a difference between granting fascists (who while granted Spencer is, Jones really isn't; he's just kinda a general right-wing nutcase) a platform and agreeing with them. I think Dorsey made the wrong call in suspending him for "hate speech" rules instead of actual ToS violations, and I don't like hate speech rules in general (because those who give a shit are those who are the most easily offended). And I'm on an instance with few to no restrictions thereon, and it's rather freeing. (It also has a 65k-character limit, which is nice.)
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if MGB won, just because a lot of the Mastodon base right now (at least mastodon.social) is so policing (of themselves and others). I mean, you kicked off Wil fucking Wheaton, and he's as far left as I thought you could get before joining Mastodon (*Soviet national anthem intensifies*).
I think Spencer and Jones have the right to speak. I also think we have the right to prove them wrong on those same platforms. Shutting them up, unless they are literally directing violence against people, only gives those in power the tools to shut up whoever the fuck they want for whatever reason they want.
@4of92000 Also, when you hijack accounts to make your own preferred content more visible to others, that's explicitly fascist. Jack deliberately took control of individual accounts out of the hands of their owners in order to push a right-wing agenda. I don't give a damn if Trump has a Twitter, but to start putting likes on his posts from MY account so my followers (who hate him as much as I do, if not more) see more of him? Inexcusable.
@4of92000 @4of92000 It's been all over Twitter today. Several accounts were going over it, saying that they had been hit. Some people are saying it's a "bug" but most don't buy it because most of the tweets being reported are of Trump and his sympathizers.
As to fascism, my take on it is that when people are interested only in having and wielding power for their own benefit and to the detriment of or dispassion towards those who they are supposed to serve, they're fascist.
@doctornovakaine
... the fuck? I'm going to need to see a citation on those ghost likes.
Also do me a favor and define fascist, please.