I used to click breaking news to see what others were saying, then they did the "you have to create an account to see this" and all the sudden, I didn't care anymore.
Even worse is that Twitter/X still has an air of mainstream legitimacy since others built it into a household name before musk decided to vaporize billions of dollars to be able to enshittify it.
It was never a good platform. Mainstream media just liked it because they could rationalize any shit take they wanted to push by saying "thousands of people on twitter are concerned about X problem". Their audience didn't realize that those thousands is the same as one belligerent drunk at a bar who won't shut up.
they could rationalize any shit take they wanted to push by saying “thousands of people on twitter are concerned about X problem”
A lot of the time they don't put any number on the people, and then it turns out they wrote a whole-ass article on what dozens of people on twitter are saying.
Yeah I was never really a user, or considered it particularly good. But I think the mainstream legitimacy was definitely there. Any company, media personality, celebrity, brand, etc was pretty much expected to have a presence there, and you’d see their @usernames displayed prominently even outside Twitter. Or even just the little bird icon so you knew to look for them there.
A lot of creators are still there, and outright dismissed even alternatives like bluesky, let alone Mastodon, which many of them call a "tech-bro infested hellscape" (most of the techbros moved back to Xitter the moment thez were allowed to say the N-word).
But we're there any better platforms that people were using? The problem was that all the alternatives were doing next tot nothing for countering disinformation. Twitter was the best of a bad situation.
Yeah it's all about orders of magnitude. X has over 100 million daily users while Truth Social has around half a million (and that's the highest estimate I saw). Even if only one percent of X users are spreading misinformation that's more users than if everyone on Truth Social is spreading misinformation.
Name a single prominent account on Truth Social that isn’t Trump…
I think its got at least a couple of Congresspeople / Gubernatorial accounts on it. There are lots of prominent names within MAGA world (Laura Loomer, Michelle Malkin, etc). Also, there's whatever madman is still posting under Herman Cain's account.
The really stupid thing is that even though I ditched Twitter long before Elon bought it and started turning it into a dumpster fire it still gets shoved in my face constantly because shitty "journalists" continually link and quote some dumb random on there and spin whatever their dumb ass says into "people are saying/doing/boycotting/protesting/etc etc etc ad nauseum..."
I had a 2fa on shitter and then I factory reset my phone and the 2fa app stored shit locally, so all of my 2fas were gone. One of them was shitter. Tried to log in, but they wanted me to call them and go through hoops and loops to retrieve my account. It was for the better. I let it go for good. It has absolutely nothing anyway, I was just a lurker. Fuck Elon.
X probably has far more traffic. I don't find it particularly hard to believe that there is a higher quantity of misinformation there. Maybe not a higher concentration though.
I already disliked it before Elon, and haven't logged in since. I was literally just using it to antagonize a guy who was rude to me about Bitcoin years ago.
Isn't Mastadon more a loose conglomeration of independent self-hosted instances? Sort of the Lemmy to Twitter's Reddit? Might be good to cite a few high quality Mastadon instances than just point people to "Mastadon" as a generic source.
Also should note that there's still the Garbage-In / Garbage-Out problem. Mastadon is only as good as its user base. Twitter's admin went from bad to nightmarish under Elon, but it was still choke full of annoying, manipulative bullshit. Mastadon has all the same problems, just on a smaller scale because of its lighter userbase. Get the environment up to 400M users and you're going to see the exact same basket of incentives for manipulation and abuse.
Hell, just look at Threads. Same exact problems, just skewed towards Facebook friendly corporate influencers rather than Twitter friendly Groypers.
I agree it's got more lies than truth social based on its number of users, but It also has the best opportunity for unregulated truths. I think in order to have a platform we can be sure holds the truth, unfortunately, you're going to open the doors to untruths, too. There is no good without letting in some bad, because in order to force good, you have to become authoritarian, and authoritarian spaces are easily manipulated with no way for us to figure out if it's true or not.