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Pnictogen Horses Profile picture
@PnictogenHorses
Apr 3 • 10 tweets • 8 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
a quick comment on @Twitter / @TwitterDev and how @elonmusk's control of these entities now means that we can't trust "engagement" statistics from Twitter any more.

it's widely grasped that Musk's loyalists are doing whatever they can to maximize their visibility here.

(cont'd)
that's also meant that @elonmusk's instructing @Twitter / @TwitterDev staff to suppress *critics* of Musk and his right-wing #Twitter regime—it's to be noted that fierce independent champion of #FreeSpeech, @mtaibbi, has no opinion about Musk's Twitter censorship.

(cont'd)
most likely @mtaibbi knows that he *benefits* from @elonmusk's dictatorial meddlings with @Twitter and #Twitter visibility, so of course he's not going to complain about it—when pressed, he'll probably claim that it's Elon Musk's right to rule Twitter dictatorially.

(cont'd)
"free speech" is an extremely flexible thing, in the hands of a gifted doublethinker and manipulator like @mtaibbi. but I digress.

it's clear (especially with the "blue check" / verification fiasco) that @elonmusk is playing treacherous games with @Twitter visibility.

(cont'd)
it's not clear any longer that engagement numbers or even numbers of followers on @Twitter have reliable meaning, because @elonmusk and his loyalists are futzing with these things all the time. does Elon Musk really have over 100 million followers? how can we ever know?

(cont'd)
and yet, I find that freeing somehow. because my own engagement numbers are so low—I'm not a popular @Twitter user to start with, I write in a lengthy style, and lately I've been seeing my engagement numbers fall off to nearly nothing. but I'm not sure it _matters_.

(cont'd)
let's put it this way: just because I see an engagement value of "1" or even "0" on one of my tweets here...thanks to @elonmusk and his gang at @Twitter / @TwitterDev, I don't even know if that number is true or not. maybe I'm being seen by dozens, hundreds of eyes!

(cont'd)
there's no way for me to know, because @Twitter is now @elonmusk's toy, and Elon Musk is so fundamentally untrustworthy! everything he touches turns to crap, including Twitter's "analytics". they don't tell me anything that I can trust...so I don't need to believe them.

(cont'd)
the applicability of this paradox about the lack of trust inherent in @Twitter engagement data under the arbitrary regime of @elonmusk, to the credibility of @mtaibbi and @ShellenbergerMD and the #TwitterFiles, I leave as an exercise to the reader.

~Mona Drafter of Pnictogen
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More from @PnictogenHorses

Pnictogen Horses Profile picture
Apr 4
incidentally, *another* bad sign that some offered reading material is in fact propaganda is that the author (or pusher) of the work refuses to explain anything about it. @mtaibbi is particularly adept at evading difficult questions about the nature of his work.

(cont'd)
(may I tag you in, @Jacob__Siegel? you may learn something...or you may not.)

there's a number of reasons why @mtaibbi is reluctant to explain his propaganda. emotional appeal is one reason: he's trying to tempt readers in, hinting at *mystery* and forbidden secrets.

(cont'd)
this is central to the appeal of bigotry and bigoted conspiracy theories, like the Sinophobic rubbish about #COVID19 that @NateSilver538 (and @mtaibbi and his @GOP allies) have been peddling, or the antisemitic crap that's popular with the @elonmusk / @MrAndyNgo crowd.

(cont'd)
Read 11 tweets
Pnictogen Horses Profile picture
Apr 4
when is it *acceptable* not to read something that's pushed in front of you? most of us (myself included) are mortal beings, bound by time and entropy like everyone; we've got a thousand daily concerns to balance, and we can't read everything that's recommended to us.

(cont'd)
now, if you're a propagandist like @mtaibbi or @charlesmurray, it's never acceptable not to read their junk—and that attitude, right there, is a key hint that their work *is* in fact junk. it's not _proof_ but it's a strong indication that they're pushing propaganda.

(cont'd)
for the point of propaganda is not to be persuasive in terms of logic and rational inference and sensible deductions from evidence. propaganda's appeal is *emotional* appeal; @mtaibbi's work, and other right-wing propaganda, is designed to be _maximally memetic_.

(cont'd)
Read 18 tweets
Pnictogen Horses Profile picture
Apr 4
this article indicates why racist dolts like @NateSilver538 and @mtaibbi (not to mention all those Christofascist pundits like @DouthatNYT) are so cynical about higher education: in *their* social stratum, the point of college isn't to learn anything.

archive.is/XDGO3
a high-status college means *networking*, making powerful friends, getting job offers for no better reason than "you've been to the same upper-crust finishing school as me". @NateSilver538 is a dunce because he's never *needed* to be good at schooling—not with his connections.
all those rich parents know the score; they're willing to pay millions just to get a string of big names onto their kids' resumes. @NateSilver538's equally racist (and equally stupid) pal, @mattyglesias, son of a Hollywood writer, got sent to a $50k/year *grade school*.
Read 4 tweets
Pnictogen Horses Profile picture
Apr 3
I'm awaiting an event in the near future; I'm not quite sure how it's going to play out, or how quickly. but I suspect that the fiasco of @elonmusk's ownership and right-wing politicization of @Twitter will mark the end of a global illusion, perpetuated on the Internet.

(cont'd)
the illusion was that the #Internet was somehow equivalent to #democracy itself. merely being on the Internet, in this social illusion, was like participating in democracy. the idea was that "everyone" had a voice of equal weight and importance to every other voice.

(cont'd)
nobody bought into that illusion, or put more energy into sustaining it, harder than @jack Dorsey and @Twitter.

it's a lie. access to the #Internet is a matter of money, just like everything else in this authoritarian, capitalist society. the rich get *more Internet*.

(cont'd)
Read 20 tweets
Pnictogen Horses Profile picture
Apr 3
one of the sillier manifestations of right-wing ideology in this era of electronic mass communication—which seems to have dissolved all political discourse into a soup of memes and buzzwords—is the oxymoronic "anarchocapitalism", or #AnCap. it's big with computer geeks.

(cont'd)
surely a large fraction of the @elonmusk / @mtaibbi / @ShellenbergerMD right-wing Twitter clique—which attracts mostly people who enjoy the luxury of "passive income" through non-productive means, like management or cryptocurrency—fancy themselves "anarchocapitalist".

(cont'd)
why not? the average @elonmusk / @mtaibbi fan has a purely emotional and aesthetic appreciation of political and economic terminology. they don't think of "anarchism" as a body of political theory, but as a mood or a pose—being rebellious, breaking all the rules, etc.

(cont'd)
Read 20 tweets
Pnictogen Horses Profile picture
Apr 3
there's a curious phenomenon that's been broadly encouraged and rewarded by corporate media. @mtaibbi (who is very much "corporate media", even though his special grift requires him to pretend he's not corporate) has given us a particular good example of the phenomenon.

(cont'd)
but Matt Taibbi is far from the only example of this phenomenon: the journalist or writer or other designated expert who *refuses to discuss their own work*. @mtaibbi refuses to answer questions on his work (unless they're questions from within his ideological bubble).

(cont'd)
it's a strange business, because it's like @mtaibbi is treating *his own writing* as though it were coming from an outside source—as though he were Daniel Ellsberg turning over the "Pentagon Papers" to the @nytimes and Neil Sheehan (peace be on him; he died in 2021.)

(cont'd)
Read 19 tweets

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