this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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I feel like normally I would share y'all's view on this and be like "good" but now I can't help think about how Twitter was a critical space for organizing a lot of resistance movements. Really starting to believe those pieces that were like "Musk bought Twitter to bury it"
We were all like "he's not that smart" at the first few articles, but now I'm like, this dude has poisoned the well so utterly - and now he's getting rid of blocking, apparently? - like, fuck. (And yes organizing on a corpo platform was never going to be truly reliable/safe, but still, esp for folks just getting exposed to activism, this "on ramp" space going to shit really sucks.)
I know we'll always find/create new spaces for ourselves, but this is a blow to a lot of networks.
I absolutely believe he intentionally tanked it. Getting funded by the Saudis, though, means that he doesn't have to be smart to do it. He's just a puppet. Easy to manipulate, because though he doesn't need money, he does need attention. Perhaps the easiest kind of manipulation.
The Twitter buyout was partially funded by Saudi investors, and there hasn’t been much public discourse about whether they’re pissed it’s value has tanked or whether they wanted that to happen all along.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/saudis-kingdom-holding-company-maintain-twitter-stake-2022-10-28/