With Cow No Where in Site, Twitter to Purge White House account followers

[Jimmy Higgins]

The Biden soon to be Administration is upset that his White House will be inheriting zero followers on its Twitter account. Twitter hasn't really given an explanation as to why they are doing this. In doing so, official announcements on the White House Twitter page will need to repopulate its followers of trolls, bots, and saboteurs. Doing so from scratch will take a while.

It should be noted that Trump typically used his personal Twitter account as the President's account, making Twitter's maneuver a bit more odd. Regardless, Fuck Twitter!

And I don't say that because I view this as a political move. I mean it more as a fuck it for the harm it has done to dialogue. Fuck Twitter for the echo chambers it has needlessly created. Fuck Twitter for its inability to care about Bot accounts that scam likes, comments, etc... because doing so would be bad for business. Twitter is a disease! They created a completely insecure system, let it get riddled with millions of BOTS driving agendas across its platform, and once it is way too late to address it... they want to purge some Government accounts of its followers. How about purging BOTS?

The Biden Admin will survive.

Also, fuck Twitter... in general.

 

[Gospel]

I feel like this should be in Rants.

 

[TomC]

I feel like this should be in Rants.

Yep.
I pretty much agree that social media like Twitter is a disease. But still, people who follow and swallow anything that feeds their addiction are the real problem. Not the people who delivered the goods.
Tom

 

[funinspace]

Well sure, but millions of cockroaches wallow around in it and help spread it around...

 

[Angry Floof]

I feel like this should be in Rants.

Yep.
I pretty much agree that social media like Twitter is a disease. But still, people who follow and swallow anything that feeds their addiction are the real problem. Not the people who delivered the goods.
Tom

Never hold power accountable. Better to focus on the ordinary citizens, consumers, the stressed and impoverished. You can't blame an insanely rich and powerful social media platform provider for spending hundreds of millions, if not billions, on enticing advertising and advertising research to find out all the best ways to manipulate people who are otherwise not paying attention to anything but day to day survival and to get them addicted to their products. No, it's the ones among us with the weakest defenses against sophisticated manipulation that are the real problem. I mean, corporations are not people anyway, so you can't expect them to be anything but amoral. If those people want more power, they need to work for it hire thousands of people to do the work for them.

I think you would agree that helping the population at large become more aware of the tricks that are used against them every day by marketing and media should be a high priority in our world, but sadly, we don't value helping ordinary people become more resistant to corporate manipulation so we don't put power and money toward it. Instead, our society values profits and unfettered, unconscious capitalism, and making sure power and money stays where it is, which is not with addicts, but who are also people who can't fight back when power apologists need a scapegoat.

 

[Jarhyn]

Consent is only as good as the symmetry of information that it is built on. If you knowingly sell shit to someone who wanted to not buy shit, and the only thing keeping them from getting not-shit were your own trickery, that's as evil as outright lying to them. We even have names for it in nerd-dom: "lawful evil".

I can say, in a D&D game, I would just as soon kill the devil who "made me a prince" by turning them into a frog prince, or a "prince albert", or some other awful thing as I would the demon who just wanted to murder the townsfolk outright.

Asymmetrical bargaining is an ethical plague and we need to leverage strength of "us" against anyone who would leverage on anything for any other reason.