"By banning some of us, Musk is sending a message to everyone else: Comply with the dictator or lose access. Twitter has become a virtual simulation of authoritarian rule."
"But Musk didn’t build Twitter. We, collectively, turned the bird app into a consequential power. If it remains under the control of a man who sees journalists as enemies, we have a moral responsibility to fly the coop."
--@gilduran on getting banned from #twitter.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/elon-musk-twitter-ban-censorship-17680044.php
@georgelakoff @gilduran "Honestly, I was surprised Twitter would go after a local journalist with fewer than 7,500 followers."
That's really the key phrase.
#Musk said journalists have to abide by the site's rules too, that they aren't special and somehow above the rules.
This journalist was surprised by that.
And it pretty much proves the point Musk was making about #journalism.
I'm no fan of #Elon Musk, but I'm even less excited about journalists with inflated senses of themselves.
That's a great illustration of how journalists have lost so much credibility with the public lately, and they don't seem to get that.
It's still important to say that the rule was arbitrarily created by musk and also enforced arbitrarily. Then he backed off on the bans as quickly as he could after pushback. Shortly after, we discovered the whole episode that supposedly triggered Musk was bullshit.
I'm afraid i don't find this whole "they need follow the rules" thing compelling in the least..
@michaelcoyote @georgelakoff @gilduran Since I really don't care about #Twitter or #Musk, meh, I don't think it's that important to say anything about the rules on that site. It's a garbage site and not really worth attention.
I DO care about the state of #journalism, though, and I really wish journalists had more awareness about the reasons they've lost so much credibility in recent generations.
I don't know how many times I've heard panel discussions among journalists lamenting that the public just doesn't trust them anymore, and they don't know why.
This. This is why.
@volkris @michaelcoyote @georgelakoff @gilduran nah. Journalists have lost public trust because their media organizations are now fully controlled either by corporations directly or by politicians controlled by corporations in the case of public broadcasters .
@Azih
Certainly some organizations have and some journalists have fallen in line with their organization's "editorial line". Some organizations have long been like this (e.g. NYT and their long history of of fascist apoliga).
That said I feel like there's a "war on truth and public trust" being fought right now and there are a lot of organizations that don't get it while many individual writers 100% do.
@michaelcoyote @Azih @georgelakoff @gilduran
Keep in mind my specific example of journalists talking amongst themselves about how they don't get it, how they explicitly don't understand it.
I'm willing to take their word for it :-)
When I hear penal discussions from journalists talking to each other about how they don't understand their loss of respect in the public, yeah, that says so much to me!
@volkris @michaelcoyote @georgelakoff @gilduran we don't disagree on their displayed cluelessness on why they're not trusted. My contention is their cluelessness comes from them being paid not to understand why they're not trusted.
Upton Sinclair — 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'