The “stop people replying” feature was fun for about 10 seconds. I’m not worried by the boring “look at me being controversial and you can’t do anything” tweets. Whatever, they’ll stop. But a lot of misleading bullshit is going to get tweeted without being debunked in the replies
Art that’s been stolen? No reply naming the original artist. Those “facts” or “amazing places” accounts that always post incorrect nonsense? No corrections in replies. “Look how many people came to see Trump during COVID”? Replies show photo is from 2016 etc
This could be pretty good news for bad politicians, bad scientists, bigots, and basically anyone who partakes in a bit of online propaganda
This is like Elon’s birthday. Imagine if he did the usual art-stealing, “virus isn’t a big deal”, “nanoscience is bullshit”, “they liked our genius glass coffin for the cave rescue but just didn’t want to use it”, “this guy is a pedo” tweets and all his fans just soaking them up
Twitter's justification for the feature is that it's so we can have conversations with the people we want to. Like sending a DM. Twitter should add DMs. They would do the same job minus all this bullshit. Imagine, private messages with only the people you want to talk with
One last thing: people saying it's fine because you can just quote RT your response. Nooooooo. So imagine some bigot is making false claims and doing harm. Sure, quote RTing will let you make a response but you're also just amplifying their voice
You don't have to be clairvoyant to know that people will deliberately write these tweets in such a way as to get people quote RTing. Yeah you're calling them out but people don't want to see more racists, transphobes etc on their timelines thanks
Also saying people say “sure it’ll be great for bigots BUT minorities and targeted people can post without being piled on by the bigots themselves” except no. If I tweet something it doesn’t stop bigots from tweeting me, DMing me, quote RTing me...
All it does for protecting me from shitty replies is that the bigot now has 3 ways to harass me instead of 4. They can still reply, it just won’t be linked to the tweet. Meanwhile criticism of any dishonest tweets by them isn’t visible when viewing the tweet itself
The “at least we won’t be piled on” argument just makes no sense. Have you ever met transphobes for example? Changes to laws, attack ads in newspapers, death threats, fundraising... you think they’ll go “oh I have to click a different button to tweet them now, so I guess I won’t”
When it comes to notifications because assholes are trying to annoy you it won’t help. Works both ways, you can annoy some bigot and keep their phone buzzing all day. BUT now they can say anything publicly for anyone to see and you can’t correct it without also promoting it
