Liam Hogan Profile picture
Nov 5, 2022 15 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Thanks to everyone for their kind words. I wish this wasn’t happening but the choice has been made for us. We were sold out and I now refuse to countenance giving this Musk-poisoned company my free labour/content. Let’s all catch up over on Mastodon.
You can find me here. I spent the day on it yesterday. Took a while to get the hang of it but it was a lovely experience. Join us. mastodon.ie/@Limerick1914
Some further thoughts on my Mastodon experience: it has made me step back and reevaluate how social media should operate. We built entire communities on here but were ultimately treated like a product for trade. It does not have to be like this.
We should demand that our social media platforms reflect and serve their communities rather than exploit them. Currently billion dollar tech companies engage a suite of psychological and algorithmic techniques to manipulate what we see in our feeds to boost advertising metrics.
Mastodon is not a panacea but it is a non-profit, ad-less, localised and federated social media platform. ‘instances’ are administrated and moderated by volunteers. When the #twitterexodus started yesterday the Irish instance I joined (mastodon.ie) was overwhelmed.
The admins reacted quickly, opened an open collective financial contribution page (opencollective.com/mastodonie) and within a couple of hours they had raised enough funds to upgrade the server and sustain functionality and speed.
And everyone who contributed is now a stakeholder. Because I think we see the potential for a better way to do this. And that community is growing. I also appreciate that Mastodon has decided on a really interesting ‘viral dampening’ approach to their UI design.
Twitter has become more and more like a type of outrage engine. In Mastodon there are no quote tweets, the oxygen of the pile-on. The metrics of reshares/likes are also dampened so that they are not prominent at all beneath a post in your feed. It’s a very different place.
Remember Google Fusion Tables? I spent many months building digital humanities resources around it. One was a WW1 map that identified the final resting place of the over 1,000 people from Limerick who lost their lives in that conflict.
The other was a resource that mapped the sites of Collective Punishment of African American communities in the U.S. Many other historians built fantastic resources using it as a way to visually and spatially educate about the past. It was accessible and effective.
Then in 2019 Google erased this product. Just gone forever. I realised that these billion dollar tech companies are the antithesis of libraries, cultural institutions and the open source movement.
They see culture, and our free labour in using their (temporary) tools, as instantly and permanently disposable ephemera to attract attention for the purpose of advertising. All that power and wealth put to use to fulfil such an empty mission.
I think I also forget just how much work it took to make Twitter a bearable place to be. I ended up blocking something like 55,000 different accounts, received death threats, constant trolling, spam, &c. I can only imagine what it has been like for minorities.
It took years for any semblance of meaningful and consistent moderation to exist. It was in essence a libertarian website that had to dragged kicking towards reform.
We have invested so much effort over the years for it to be useful and now it is being torn apart heedlessly at pace because a dull reactionary with money is unhappy.

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More from @Limerick1914

Mar 19
Racial Slavery Denialism in 2024: Elon Musk’s “we were all slaves” reactionary position which does not argue that the transatlantic slave trade did not happen, but instead infers that it does not matter and that it has no legacy to understand, accept or reckon with.
This is akin to saying something like “we all have ancestors who killed in wars and who died in wars” when you are trying to discuss the Holocaust. That’s how casual this denialism is.
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. The goal of this ahistorical far-right propaganda is to empty the history of the transatlantic slave trade of its unique racial element and thus remove its primary legacy (anti-black racism) as a present day factor/determinant.
Read 10 tweets
May 15, 2023
Murray is deliberately conflating nationalism and ethno-nationalism here. He is a supporter of Orbán’s ethno-nationalist anti-immigration regime in Hungary and is obsessed with limiting migration to Britain and Europe, describing multiculturalism as “death.”
Murray: “Europe is committing suicide.”

Nazi Rally (NY, 1939): “[we began] to decay the moment affluence and a consequent suicidal Liberalism brought about a lowering of racial barriers permitting an increasing degree of alien influence upon the Culture in question...”
“…and unavoidably causing the disintegration of that culture; There never has been and there can be no “international” or “interracial” Culture!”
Read 4 tweets
May 12, 2023
"The fascist project was to remake human beings into a new kind of ruthless, hard, pitiless entity [and] to expunge humanitarianism from the political system and from people’s consciences." - Richard J. Evans
The far-right use economic and social grievances to find common ground with potential recruits as part of the radicalisation process. They’ve done so every year post-Nuremberg. This is what they do and they can thrive in a moral vacuum.
There are approx 100,000 vacant properties in Ireland and yet we have a housing crisis with refugees sleeping rough in makeshift camps on the street, at risk of such attacks.

It’s unconscionable.
Read 15 tweets
May 10, 2023
I keep seeing these takes about Irish people “not counting” as white in U.S. history and honestly, there is nothing historical about such a claim. The Irish were included in the ‘white’ column of every colonial census going back to Stapleton’s Leeward Islands survey in the 1670s. ImageImage
An Irish immigrant's "white" socio-legal status was ensured by a U.S. Statute passed in 1790 which established a "uniform rule of naturalisation" for "any alien, being a free white person.”
The Chinese Exclusion Act and the Geary Act are the origins of the exclusionary concept of "illegal immigration" based on ethnicity/race in the U.S. The former was heavily influenced by an Irish immigrant & the latter was literally authored by a second-generation Irish American.
Read 32 tweets
May 8, 2023
Fascism and ethno-nationalism have always been international ideologies.
Nazism itself was partly influenced by the work of American white supremacists, eugenicists and official racist immigration policies.
Alfred Rosenberg, the influential Nazi ideologue re: race, found the term "Untermensch" in the German translation of Lothrop Stoddard's work. Stoddard was a Harvard academic and Klansman.
Read 7 tweets
May 6, 2023
American Nazi Party (1965)
Elon Musk (2023) ImageImage
That he is buying into obviously manipulated and distorted statistics, a technique used by racists for *decades* to increase racist sentiment, suggests that Musk is au fait with far-right propaganda, agrees w/ it & has likely lurked on 4chan or an equivalent for quite some time.
Read 28 tweets

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