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X Races to Contain Damage After Elon Musk Endorses Antisemitic Post (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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IBM, a major advertiser on X, has pulled its spending from the social media platform, whose employees are grappling with what to tell its other advertisers, according to internal messages.

To be clear: Musk endorsed a tweet which used a false antisemitic conspiracy theory to tell people why "Hitler was right"

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

twitter is where most people are

Twitter is gone. There is only X.

According to Musk, there are 556m monthly active "users". A year ago Musk commissioned a study that found at least 11% of active users on Twitter were bot accounts. There's plenty of reason to believe that that percentage has only gone up, especially in light of the fact that there's been a significant exodus of users due to Musk's handling of the platform, and that at the time of the study there were about 368m users. So either 200m people who were previously uninterested in Twitter were so impressed by how Musk systematically made X less functional and more expensive, or bot accounts became massively more prevalant.

Regardless, with a global adult population of 8+ billion, in no world is 556m "most people", even ignoring the bots. Facebook has 3b monthly active users. Tiktok 1b. Instagram 2b.

As for the rest of the argument, the idea that the only way for extremist voices can be held in check is to politely engage them in rational discussion is sadly nonsense. They're extremists. They aren't interested in rational discussion. The only way to hold them in check is to deplatform them, whether literally or just by the old fashioned method of social ostracism.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Hats off to the downvoter who read this and apparently thought to themselves "hell no! 556 million is a lot more than 3 billion, and definitely more than half of 8 billion!!!"