the whole world is faunching

(pic by thea temple on fb)

Visions of darkness.

"So: Twitter. I’ve been a very active user for nine years. I have around 8K followers. I met my partner on Twitter and I’ve made many other wonderful connections there. And like all of you, I’m ever-more repulsed by the platform’s blatant fascist favoring. How I’ve got to use an enormous blockchain to make it slightly less likely frothing tiki-torchers will dominate my mentions. How Twitter conditions me to waste my time obsessively refreshing my feed and bickering with Pepes and bots. How I’ve reported and identified dozens of users blatantly violating Twitter rules by doxxing and threatening others, with nothing coming of it 99.9% of the time. I’ve been using it a lot less already - but I haven’t quite been able to give it up.

So last week I decided to do an experiment vis a vis Twitter as Nazi Trashfire: I’d try to get verified, which I had previously resisted due to privacy concerns. I sent them my employee profile page at my org at Harvard, my Slate contributor page, and my long-time personal website. I mentioned I’d been an engaged user for nine years in the extra comments box (which, you know, I’d assume they could see I’ve been a user that long).

Got an email a couple of days later: denied. Nope, Twitter won’t verify me. Just a day after they verified an Actual Nazi. Evidence is consistent with my hypothesis that Twitter is in fact a Nazi Trashfire.

My not-so-slow fade from Twitter continues. The injury it did my attention span was bad enough: catering to Nazis is the nail in the coffin.

Boy, I miss 2011, when we thought social media would make democracy better, not hand it over to Anime Twitter Nazis." --faineg on Mefi thread

Zbalermorna.

"The sun climbs higher, and still the skies are pale' --Stickney