The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X

Then stop already. Stop mentioning the name. Stop posting articles about it. Stop sharing articles about it on other social media.

You know what's immoral? Posting ragebait articles about a platform because you know users will engage.

This is your daily reminder to engage and boost Twitter alternatives such as Mastodon. It's not enough to ignore Twitter. We must build communities to draw in users, show them social media can exist without Elon or Zuck. Only when good alternatives exist, with content and people sought after, do users feel safe to abandon old platforms.

Can we all just boycott anything having to do with Musk/Twitter? I just want a browser extension that will automatically prevent me from going to a site that has any sort of links or anything related to twitter. Your blog also links to your Twitter account? Fuck you, I'm not reading it. Your news story references a tweet from somebody? Fuck you I'm not reading it. Your Lemmy post talks about Musk or Twitter? Fuck you, I'm not reading it. I just want all mention of Musk or Twitter or X completely erased from the internet. It may unfortunately impact any reference to anything else 'X' related, but that's a small price to pay for a Musk-free life.

I made a burner to see for myself after using it for work a few years ago. It’s a complete dumpster fire now, way worse than before. Bots and shitty animated gambling ads everywhere. Porn bots and scammers are trying to follow you every 2 seconds. Elon’s dipshit musings/ragebait are forced into your feed even when you block him. Any tweets you make get zero engagement. remaining accounts are either bots, racists, fascists, or creators and celebrities moaning and/or hemming and hawing about leaving all the time because muh ego. It’s not even worth witnessing the spectacle.

It’s also fucking straight up broken half the time. Mastodon is a breath of fresh air in comparison even pre-Elon. Wish more would use it.

Can we take a step back for a second and think about the human condition that led someone to need a moral argument to get off X? What kind of pathetic, fucked up mind do you have where you can't just uninstall the app you have to appeal to morality.

That moral case was already there like a decade ago.

When he called the Philippine men, risking their lives to save children stuck and about to die in an underground cave, pedophiles because they refused to consider musk's retarded dive capsule idea... That was the moment that the moral case was there and it never left.

Musk is a scammer, he is a dumbass, he is incompetent, got fired for being incompetent, he just got really lucky winning the company shares jackpot when that company got bought out. That's all. He has a quality to make dumbass people listen to him and look up to him and make them somehow believe that he's smart but every word out of his mouth is either a lie or just really really painfully dumb.

I'm doing my part by never having used Twitter, and continuing the trend by never using X. Also, I don't own a Tesla, and I don't plan on going to one of Elon's Mars eugenics colonies. So I feel no responsibility or moral complacency about adding any money or power to the portfolio of that fucking twat.

I joined Twitter fairly recently as Machine Learning Twitter is/was a thing, and I wanted to stay abreast of news from people like Andrej Karpathy, Chris Olah, Andrew Ng etc., especially since r/MachineLearning went down the shitter.

But I can't even - I log on and just instantly see ragebait posts from Daily Mail talking heads and bullshit.

Are there any better alternatives for this purpose?

Lead by example. At least stop pretending that this news article/opinion piece belongs in a technology.

TIL we need convincing about that on Lemmy

The fediverse provides an alternative for people who care about using ethical products. Haven't tried threads/bluesky but they seem like more of the same. Unfortunately I don't think people care about the ethics of their micro-blogging platform; their biggest priority is having the largest soap box to shout from.

I know a lot of people relying on it for sharing research papers and finding them. It's depressing to not have an alternative.

If torturing primates isn't enough for u what is,????

Does anyone here actually use it? I literally never made an account

Downvote Musk spam.

The billionaire doesn’t need your help ensuring him and his businesses stay in the headlines every day. Don’t be a useful idiot.

I deleted that shit months ago.

Damn, this is actually quite compelling. I knew X/Twitter was bad, but didn't realize just how bad it has become. Thanks for posting.

I still use X for work and have noticed an increase in the amount of hate speech and racist content. Its started appearing on my feed.

Problem is legacy Twitter still has huge scale so it's not so simple to switch to something else if you need a big audience. It will take time.

I don't need a moral reason, I just think it's shit as it was before it rebranded

Deleted my X recently - not looking back.

I just wish the artists would leave, but no other social media allows porn too.

Lol, anyone who uses Twitter doesn't do it for morality. The mouth breathers are addicted to the drama and that's all there is to it

Ditched just over a year ago. My world is still as it should be. It's just a terrible app / organisation with gaming addiction

Do as you say please

I finally left around the name change. Account is still there but I normally only check it when I'm texted a link, which rarely happens.

I'm sure that I'm effectively shadowbanned on X. But then again this was an issue I had with pre-Musk Twitter.

It feels like the only way to get noticed is to be a celebrity with an existing following.

I never used Twitter in the first place because I had no idea what it was for.

Still don't.

Every single one of these things seemed to be "It's Facebook, but you can only do [gimmick]"

This is nothing new. This was one of the reasons I never even joined Twatter.

I'd really love to see what the twitter (or YouTube) feed is for a normal user. I don't doubt that the algorithms push extreme content, because that's what humans are naturally drawn to. After all, we want to look at car crashes aswell. However, I'm just really curious on why these people simply don't train the algorithm better.

Every now and then I get some right-wing(ish) video recommendation on YouTube and after I mark it as "not interested" it dissapears and it just goes back to recommending me stuff I'm actually interested in. Same with 1 minute long videos. I don't need to flag too many of them before it realizes it's not the content I don't like but the short lenght. In my personal experience twitter is way less agressive at pushing such content but even when it does the same solution works there too. "Not interested" and it stops showing up. Except for cat videos. Those never stop showing up no matter how often I mark it.

Haha imagine caring this much about a social media site.

Imagine also still using Facebook. Losers.