Thread by @SethAbramson

(🧵) This is the story of how far-right snowflakes afraid of free speech and facts—obsessed, instead, with their Big Important Feelings and using speech to brutalize others—destroyed Twitter.

I hope you’ll follow along and share this to the extent the Musk Algorithm allows it.

1/ Prior to Musk purchasing Twitter, Twitter had an algorithmic far-right bias. It was biased toward far-right persons, entities, and posts. This wasn’t opinion; this was what the data showed.

The data was *so clear* that Twitter had to admit what it was. theguardian.com/technology/202…

2/ But it wasn’t just the data that confirmed the political bias of pre-Musk Twitter, it was what conservatives love most—*anecdotes*—and what Democrats tend to focus on most: history.

Public and private reports confirmed that social media (including Twitter) helped elect Trump.

3/ The problem for Twitter, however, was that despite its role in electing Trump and the hard data *confirming* it had a systematic far-right algorithmic bias, far-right Twitter users didn’t *feel* like Twitter was that way.

And only part of it was their Big Important Feelings.

4/ Sure, part of the issue was that Trump had redefined conservatism as perpetual (wholly imagined) victimhood—his own; Whites’; his voters’; Christians’; and so on—so that far-right snowflakes were predisposed, data be damned, to believe that someone somewhere was screwing them.

5/ But another part of it was far-right media. Once far-right media—purely for profit, attention, and clout—convinced conservatives to flee from (admittedly imperfect) corporate media that still *usually* adhered to journalistic principles, it could do anything to them it wanted.

6/ What it found—this’ll surprise no one—is that far-right media makes the most money, gets the most attention, and accrues the most clout when it tells conservatives they’re victims, which is what (based on them now being temperamentally crybabies) they all always felt they are.

7/ And because far-right media doesn’t adhere to *any* journalistic principles or even invest in journalism as a profession—almost all its major figures (e.g. Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones) have at one point admitted that they’re just “entertainment [for self-pitying losers]”—...

8/ ...far-right media told Twitter users—for that matter other social media users, including those on Facebook, the site that played the biggest role in spreading the pro-Trump disinformation that helped a known weirdo become POTUS in 2016) that Twitter was biased *against* them.

9/ What did far-right Twitter users do, once they believed—contra the data, anecdotal evidence and history, but *consistent* with their Big Important Feelings and the online disinformation they had tearfully sought out to coddle their fears of victimhood—Twitter was against them?

10/ Did they stay and fight on Twitter? LOL, no.

Did they say that more speech is the answer to (supposedly) overwhelming leftist speech on Twitter? LOL, no.

Did they keep calm and maintain a stiff upper lip—like warriors? LOL, no...please stop guessing. You know what they did.

11/ They fled.

They turned tail and ran for the digital hills, whining and caterwauling and wailing and gnashing their teeth the whole way.

12/ And they built new safe spaces for their Big Important Feelings.

Oh, the many safe spaces MAGAs built to protect themselves from progressive speakers and journalism that—mostly—adhered to time-honored journalistic principles!

The list of their safe spaces is almost endless.

13/ A PARTIAL LIST OF MAGA SAFE SPACES

{places MAGAs ran to because a provably far-right-biased Twitter wasn’t far *enough* right to coddle their Big Important Feelings)

♥️ Gab
♥️ GETTR
♥️ Mastodon*
♥️ Parler
♥️ Rumble
♥️ Truth Social

*Exclusive instances that tossed leftists.

14/ A PARTIAL LIST OF MAGA SAFE SPACES (CONTINUED)

♥️ 4chan
♥️ 8kun
♥️ Discord
♥️ Facebook*
♥️ Reddit
♥️ Telegram
♥️ TheDonald[.]win
♥️ WhatsApp

*A retrenchment io longstanding Facebook groups that tossed any leftists.

These are just a *few* of the MAGAs’ favorite safe spaces.

15/ And in their precious safe spaces the MAGAs did everything *but* celebrate free speech. They tossed progressives almost immediately; or sought to brutalize rather than engage with them; or used them as loci to strategize how to terrorize free-speaking progressives elsewhere.

16/ It was in these safe spaces that “free speech” became not a principle—after all, few of the MAGAs had ever read the Constitution, and they certainly did *not* believe in Freedom of the Press (1A) or non-establishment of religion (1A)—but simply an empty partisan rallying cry.

17/ The two major problems with these many, many (many) MAGA safe spaces were these:

(i) They were boring to be in, because no progressives wanted to go there, any who did were chased off, and therefore everyone remaining *agreed with everyone else*; and
(ii) they were atomized.

18/ Because any MAGAs reading this won’t know what the word “atomized” means, I’ll explain: it means that the whining, crying, self-mythologizing victim-MAGAs had created *so many safe spaces* that now their “movement” (😂) was divided up into far too many cells to be effective.

19/ Now, when I say “effective” here, that’s really a fraught word.

It’s *not* that the MAGA diaspora wanted to re-congeal because it thought it would be more effective at persuading fence-sitters via reformation—MAGAs can’t and don’t care about persuading anyone of anything—...

20/ ...it was that, divided into their countless bespoke safe spaces, they felt isolated from one another and began to fear that maybe they *were* just as fringe as almost the whole planet considers them to be. In their hearts some of these far-right snowflakes began to wonder...

21/ So the desire of the far-right snowflakes to reform in a place where they could feel safety in numbers was, once again, about (a) their Big Important Feelings and (b) their sense of victimhood and isolation and having a really hard go of it because it isn’t 1935 anymore (🎻).

22/ By the way, that was the world’s smallest violin.

23/ Concurrent to all this, there was a pudgy, pasty, creepy billionaire who was going through a breakup, who’d just been disowned by one of his kids, and felt like the cool kids in journalism and government were starting to think of him as what (candidly) he is: an abject loser.

24/ This loser—who holds racist and antisemitic and misogynistic and lots of *really* creepy views about society—was feeling sad on Twitter because many of the people he thought he might be able to make friends with had been tossed off Twitter for violating its Terms of Service.

25/ Now, to be clear, this pasty billionaire had spent his *whole life* believing in the power of corporations to do whatever they want, and would—by July 2023—have made a name for himself by justifying the worst assaults against free speech imaginable in the name of corporatism.

26/ Want an example? OK. Here’s the conservative WSJ on the deal Musk just signed with the Chinese Communist Party:

“Tesla was the only foreign carmaker to sign the pledge, and its vow to advance values linked to the Communist Party was notable...”

Yep. wsj.com/articles/tesla…

27/ So this wasn’t a man who had any values—certainly not any related to free speech. But he had things in common with the MAGAs:

(i) He used free speech as an empty slogan;
(ii) he was lonely;
(iii) he felt like a victim;
(iv) he always privileged his Big Important Feelings...

28/

(v) he was temperamentally incapable of understanding the difference between dialogue and trolling;
(vi) he had an issue with Jews and other minorities;
(vii) he believed GOP governance in the U.S. would do more to let companies screw over their workers and consumers...

29/

(viii) he lacked moral scruples;
(ix) he craved empty drama rather than anything meaningful (e.g. he preferred memes to journalism, juvenile humor to self-enlightenment); and
(x) he was a lifelong pathological liar—skilled not just at gaslighting others but lying to himself.

30/ I am speaking of Elon Musk, of course.

31/ And I’m speaking of the most beautiful confluence in MAGA history—at least since the golden escalator and all those paid “Trump supporters” (remember, Trump was such a known creepster in 2015 that he couldn’t find *anyone* who was *actually* enthusiastic about his candidacy).

32/ The MAGAs needed a place to re-form themselves (not reform themselves, sadly, just re-form themselves).

And Musk needed friends in the same way and to the same extent Trump had needed *adoration* in 2015.

Fortunately, Musk (unlike Trump) actually had some money in the bank.

33/ So Musk bought Twitter, and the *first thing he did* was lie to the world and say Twitter had a far-*left* algorithmic bias—contrary to what all data he had in front of him said. It was *his* Big Lie.

Remember the data he was working with at the time: theguardian.com/technology/202…

34/ This Big Lie, which had just become far harder to contest because Twitter was now a private company co-owned by Musk and the Saudi royal family—despicable cretins who murder, cut up, and burn their enemies—gave Musk his (false) justification to move Twitter more to the right.

35/ But Musk worried his Big Lie would not be enough. After all, the world had *just read* in international major-media reporting that Twitter had *confessed* to having a systematic, algorithmic far-right political bias. So how in the *world* would Musk convince people otherwise?

36/ I suspect you all know where this is going, now.

37/ That’s right: the #TwitterFiles.

Musk found some disgruntled former journalists who had become right-wing grifters, and he cut them a deal no actual journalist would ever accept: he would *hand-pick* anecdotal internal information that *contradicted* the Twitter hard data...

38/ ...and would feed it to them as an “exclusive.”

It was a win-win. The wildly misleading, cherrypicked, systematically lied-about internal anecdotes Musk selected for release would constitute a massive disinformation-cum-PR campaign intended to cover up the Big Lie he’d told.

39/ In fact, nothing had changed: Twitter had a massive, proven, hard-data-confirmed far-right algorithmic bias that needed to be fixed ASAP, and the far-right trolls it had banned under its Terms of Service had been banned solely because they had *contempt* for private industry.

40/ This last point really needs to be discussed in more detail.

41/ As progressives know, because we know history and the U.S. Constitution, and MAGAs do not know because they do not care about either of those things, the free speech of a speaker is only constitutionally burdened when it is the *government* doing the burdening. Simple enough.

42/ MAGAs got around this by a) turning “free speech” into an empty rallying cry that could mean anything at all (and conveniently it came to mean something that had nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution—namely just MAGAs being able to do whatever whenever wherever however)...

43/ ...and b) covering up the fact that their use of the phrase was anti-capitalist, anti-Constitutional, counter-historical, and suited only to their Big Important Feelings by *falsely* using the cherrypicked, misleading #TwitterFiles to imagine a Twitter-government conspiracy.

44/ Even the #TwitterFiles authors—whose only goal (mission accomplished!) was to get rich off them—conceded they had no evidence at all of the federal government *ordering* Twitter to *censor* any speech *ever*.

But the #TwitterFiles were still a useful adjunct to the Big Lie.

45/ So Musk—the new owner at Twitter—set about (a) bringing back people who had violated the Twitter Terms of Service because they didn’t think corporations should be able to set internal speech regulations as the Constitution allows (i.e. anti-free speechers), (b) began work...

46/ ...making the already provably far-right-biased Twitter algorithm even *more* biased (in myriad ways, including forcing the site owner’s far-right tweets on users, banning certain progressive accounts on Musk’s order, throttling certain accounts and certain uses of Twitter...

47/ ...and more) and (c) continuing his campaign to lie about his predecessors and redefine “free speech” in a way that has nothing to do with the Constitution (indeed nothing even to do with corporations setting speech limits, as the new limits were simply his changeable whims).

48/ Musk guessed—rightly—that there’d be *no complaint* from the right about his *actual* shocking undermining of his site’s purported Terms of Service (the only free speech agreement a company has). He banned journalists, throttled websites, cooked the algorithm, stifled debate.

49/ The predictable result was (a) Threads, and (b) all non-MAGAs beginning an exodus to Threads. Not because Threads moderates—though it does—but because it has transparent Terms of Service that it honors, unlike Twitter. So *it* is the more constitutional social media platform.

50/ Soon, Twitter will be Twitter Social—a Truth Social clone. The MAGAs will be happy for a time, and then, like Dustin Hoffman in the final scene of THE GRADUATE, their eyes will go dull as they realize they have no one to fight and nothing left to win on Twitter.

A sad story.

ADDENDUM/ Obviously this is just an overview of a far more complex, interesting tale. For instance, Musk used his Twitter Blue con to make Twitter more fun for himself and his friends and stifle debate; he has now made clear his intention of influencing elections via Twitter...

ADDENDUM2/ ...He’s turned Twitter into a weapon of free speech subjugation abroad (see below, a story reported in scores of international media outlets); he’s made the platform almost a realtime Tesla ad in a way that’s strange and grotesque; and far more. aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5…

ADDENDUM3/ Here are additional reports on this subject from PROOF (some just for subscribers) that I can’t post with a social media preview because Musk *hates* free-market competition.

A Running Tally of Every Twitter Feature Elon Musk Has Broken (🔗): https://t.co/q4fKYongGZsethabramson.substack.com/p/proof-exclus…

ADDENDUM4/ This one is very hard to read due to its content. Elon Musk’s views are so much more toxic, disgusting, and bigoted than many realize.

One can like Teslas, but no one can defend this *man*.

How the Killing of Jordan Neely Broke Elon Musk (🔗): https://t.co/baUvyIG7Dssethabramson.substack.com/p/proof-exclus…

ADDENDUM5/ I’ve made a study of Elon Musk in the same way I have of an equally dangerous man, Donald Trump. And just as I wrote three national bestsellers about Trump that just cite his actions, so too this ongoing PROOF series.

The Week in Elon #1 (🔗): https://t.co/nXZhfLx9hwsethabramson.substack.com/p/the-week-in-…

ADDENDUM6/ This is the second edition of the ongoing “The Week in Elon” series at PROOF. It may help explain why Musk has stopped tweeting so much—he’s revealed far too much of himself to remain a viable “admired” public figure.

The Week in Elon #2 (🔗): https://t.co/aIexVLC6xEsethabramson.substack.com/p/the-week-in-…

NOTE/ If you find that you’re interested in subscribing to PROOF—where you’ll discover more fully sourced info of the sort in this thread—you can do so (until *midnight Sunday night*) for 30% off the already Substack-low subscription rate. See below.

🔗: https://t.co/ah6MUftkaxsethabramson.substack.com/p/independence…