The election has drawn too close not to document a lot of this. For posterity/myself, at the least.
I created a pseudonymous twitter account when it was clear Elon would be forced to buy the thing, which you probably know as “X, The Everything App”. I wanted a first-hand experience inside the descent of one of the most powerful modern communication technologies into an outright fascist propaganda tool, and I got what I wanted. Gone are the innocent days of little family kerfluffles. I was wrong, by the way ("...he's almost done unintentionally ruining it"). After the deal was made, e-neo-Nazi square was the only planned destination. I was naive.
JD Vance is white, neo-Nazi, christian theocrat, twitter. Embodied. The foretold One. A shitposter even more hated by the wokes than legend dared promise. But don't be fooled, JD's Haitian blood libel tweets are only a fraction of the reason some city in Ohio is asking for emergency powers; DJ Trump is still spinning the main set, and he's so back on the square. A lot of the agitation (cough tim pool et al.) is stirred up and amplified by foreign actors, overwhelmingly Russia, who basically ran the Hunter laptop op, and the GOP repaid in kind with anti-Ukraine policy and messaging. JD is now openly broadcasting that he is testing the limits of government abstention from intervening with a clear use of twitter to wage stochastic domestic terrorism (crtl+f "Springfield").
"But what do the polls say?”. They say establishment media has completely fucking failed, and pretending like this is naught but a horserace same-sidesy election makes you look like a dumbass. Worse than feigned or actual aloofness, WSJ on down and around have completely de-legitimized themselves. A "left-wing", not-daring-at-all article is about as good as we’re gonna get. Perhaps things like Elon suing advertisers for not advertising on twitter (again; advertisers might have left cuz of the Nazi stuff) are primarily about broad legal intimidation, including discouraging any remotely borderline cases of "libel" against Musk. And.. that’s Elon’s actual lifelong business, right? Leveraging what wealth and power he has to get more.
On that note, there is probably no way to completely disable twitter with "lawfare" in the united states anymore. Elon has already made a test run in Brazil circumventing a ban of twitter using Starlink. The US military's emerging reliance on Starlink (and that's only what's public) will make it very difficult to enforce any shutdown order in a crazy hypothetical situation I made up where e.g. Trump uses twitter to incite violence in service of his attaining the presidency. Elon, a recipient of billions of dollars in federal grants and subsidies, is then eyeing both some whack-ass new government efficiency(?) cabinet position and the lucrative possibility of millions of Americans subscribing to Starlink if other providers comply with a ban, and Donald Trump's potentially prolific and outright blood libel twitter terrorisms and incitements cannot be silenced. Twitter then leads the fascist revolution terrorist communication media. I now know that this is at least what Elon is hoping for. He’d even use that framing.
And regardless of what you think of Brazilian law or neo-Nazi violence incitements, what we are being shown so nakedly, here, is that members of the multi-billionaire class are now fully able to act as a powerful and extra-legal international sociopolitical force, if they want. Elon, daily, signals that he will continue to escalate his defiances.
Some of the Trump missteps lately are actually probably somewhat a result of Twitter's re-configuring to boost conservatives, and also because of users leaving due to lack of moderation. At this point, the MAGA and twitter echo chamber is so strong that a lot of MAGA are having serious trouble keeping reality straight. We have no actual stats or information about it whatsoever. I can tell you, unequivocally, that the antisemitic shit especially has exploded. You can find it in most big post threads now. There is no good/easy way to scrape twitter for data from the public side anymore (APIs are tens of thousand$/month to license and I honestly kinda doubt it works anymore) and discern "legitimacy". The only people able to do it are on the inside, and.. yeah something tells me that's not what's being implemented right now.
Let’s talk about revenue. A guaranteed power-user twitter botnet is eight dollars per month per bot account. The blue checks. Not All Blue Checks, but many, are bots. Sometimes people will get in a good LLM hack, maybe a full sonnet, but more often, no dice. The single-most damaging configuration change to twitter is putting blue checks at the top of every thread. These people are usually fantastically dumb, if they’re people. And now, you’ll get served an ad if there is one or more response in a thread. It was two replies, up until a few months ago, and several, if not many (at least five, I think) replies before an ad was inserted, two years ago, I think. So Elon is still trying to collect whatever he can, but the fascist pet project is obviously the main utility, for him.
But in between all that? Might as well use the most famous celebrity alive's unfavorable political endorsement as an invitation to offer her your sperm, knowing that you're too rich to get your ass beat by her NFL boyfriend. And that's why I recently got banned for 12 hours, for tweeting that I wanted to see Travis Kelce kick Elon Musk's ass. That's incitement of violence. But you can just come back and post a screenshot of the "banned" tweet, I think Elon fired all of their image-to-text capabilities when he came in.
Predictions: X (usually referred to as “the everything app”) will undeniably be (/has already been) used to mobilize violence in support of Trump winning the elections and/or illegally taking the White House if he doesn’t. Springfield, Ohio, where THEY ARE EATING THE DOGS was a trial balloon. It’s important to e.g. judge his base’s response to instruction, gauge the responses of local and federal law enforcement, etc., and, so, Trump, while out on bail for an indictment regarding the last insurrection attempt, will be granted a sustained period of extralegal “free speech" from Musk long after Trump has used the platform to perhaps even get (more) people killed. In swing states, especially Pennsylvania, expect roving neo-nazi paramilitary voter intimidation ops, and bomb threats, some or all coordinated in part on twitter. Trump and Musk will blame illegal immigrants for voting irregularities that don’t exist, and many will probably still conduct their public messaging on twitter about all of it. It’s almost certainly going to get nyyasty, guys.
Cannot believe this stupid era is still ongoing.