Your Twitter/X account is a microphone connected to a mixer controlled by a fascist. You can speak all you want. The fascist controls your volume and can mute you whenever he wants. And you might not even know you’ve been muted because you can still hear yourself in your headphones.
It’s not called resistance when your volume knob is in someone else’s hand.
@aral The problem: There is no more open microphone heard by most of the free world.
The possible alternatives are either explicitly made not to be heard widely like the #fediverse or clones of twitter with the same problems all over again.
@exception Leaving the problematic framing of the “free world” to one side, I can tell you from my experience that engagement on the fediverse is far higher than it ever was for me on Twitter. Is it the best platform if you want to broadcast to millions of people? No. Is that necessary for a healthy democracy? No. I’d argue we need quite the opposite: smaller, more meaningful, and, essentially, factual communication.
@aral It is very much necessary to reach people who won't engage and even people who don't want to be reached with political messages. This is because disinterested and badly informed people are a majority of voters, and thereby determine the course of any democratic country. In the physical world it's the freedom to distribute leaflets, put up posters in public and make oneself heard with protests. Such low-cost political messaging is needed in the digital world, too.
@exception exactly.
We might get a TON of engagement within our echo chambers. The amount of head-nodding might give a perception that we're doing a lot of good.
But just engaging with people whose minds are already on the same page does nothing to progress anything.
@volkris @aral Even if all opinions were part of the engagement, that is still not enough.
We need to reach, inform and convince almost all people about the democratic process and the different opinions.
Most people aren't stupid at all, but they have other things from work to caring for children and the elderly to do and want to enjoy life, too. But they need to be reached and somewhat informed for democracy to work.
@volkris @exception https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/111012837073757215