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Black Twitter abandons Musk's X. The influential online community that gave rise to social movements like #BlackLivesMatter is now a ‘digital diaspora’ in search of a new home
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- Title
- Fleeing Elon Musk's X, the quest to re-create 'Black Twitter'
- Published
- Aug 6 2023
- Word count
- 1959 words
Just to add to the conversation, I recently posted this quote in a Tildes comment
I was reading this article and that quote came back to me. Musk may say he's a free speech absolutist, but when that philosophy feeds racists and racist comments, he is no longer neutral. He has clearly chosen a side, and rightly Black Twitter is looking for a new home. I hope they find a good one.
What gets me the most that his word is apparently enough for so many people. Even when he's repeatedly and publicly been a hypocrite, far too many people fall back on his word, and ignore his actions. The biggest example of this was what he said about the elonjet account versus how he treated the elonjet account.
Feel free to ignore this next paragraph, it's a mini-rant:
I suppose I know why people fall back to ignoring actions and only citing what a person/company/group says, but it's sad. More so for people who claim to be Christian. James 2:14-20 is pretty clear on the matter. But it's all talk, and active ignorance of actions these days. I suppose there are some actions, but the grander gestures tend to be pretty hateful themselves. Yes, I know that was a bit of a generalization. But I'd say that the "good" Christians are not driving the ship right now.
My honest experience as a queer chick growing up in the south was that most Christians were in it for the judgement. I know its not everyone, but most of the soul crushing shit said to me in my life came from Christians being cruel on purpose under a thin veneer of 'well meaning'.
More judgement for thee means somehow more sainthood for me, that kind of thing. I don't need to pull dead rats out of my soup if I scream louder about how yours with carrots and peas touching in it are an abomination.
James 2:14-20
Worth mentioning that Martin Luther tried to quietly edit it out of the bible and relagate the words of Saint James to an appendix. A lot of modern evangelism stems from a similar vein: my faith means good feelings and well being and comfort in my own head, and I don't need any good works to my actual flesh and blood neighbours.
Those driving the ship are the ones with enough money and power to have the ship in the first place. As worshippers of Mammon of course they are primarily about themselves and power and the world: all values that Christ clearly says lead to death rather than salvation.
I suspect that Christians in power and comfort throughout the ages will always end up presenting this way. We usually do better when we're on the grill or in an arena or in prison or are homeless and starving and penniless.
Another quote by Desmond Tutu that hit home for me:
“Freedom is indivisible. Whites can't enjoy their separate freedoms. They spend too much time and resources defending those freedoms instead of enjoying them.”
Seeing that I’m a more liberal minded (and lighter skinned) individual from South Africa and currently based in the US, I have seen this to be a universal truth. The term “Apartheid” caught everyone’s attention in the 80/90’s, but this is still an issue in modern day US too.
Darker skinned people in the US are forced, by no choice of their own (due to various factors), to live different lives (mostly in criminal ridden and poorer environments and without the same resources), compared to their supposed “equal rights” white citizens.
I truly wish that the folks of @blacktwitter will find a better home. Elon Musk’s platform is certainly not it. They’re making the right decision.
If anyone wants to set it up, I’d happily fight Elon in a cage and kick his puny ass.
Can ~tildes be a home for these folks?
There's a manufactured zero-sum fallacy driving it I think. That, as a white person, if I were to let black people have more freedom, I must be losing freedom to compensate. If I work to solve economic inequality, I have to pay for it with my money. If I help put more black people in college, there's fewer spots for my more deserving white students. If I let black people feel comfortable in my neighborhood, more will show up and override my good American culture.
These appalling takes derive from this philosophy that the only way black people can prosper is if white people suffer. It's the basis of modern post-slavery American racism.
100% manufactured. See welfare queen construction and fabrication of lies about weed and D&D.
Those taking the entire cookie can best get away with it by pointing out crumbs each starving person is holding.
If you (or anyone) are interested in a book-length dive into this exact concept, check out Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us.
It’s excellent.
Gut says no, heart says yes
I'm not too familiar with twitter, but an anonymous forum plays a different role than one where people own their names. I would love it if people from@blacktwitter found us and joined but it's not a one to one replacement of what they have lost.
For those who may be unfamiliar with Tutu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Tutu
Great quote. Thank you
This quote came to mind immediately after the most recent invasion of Ukraine. Lots of republicans suddenly turned “anti-war” and pushed to be “neutral” by not arming Ukraine. Yeah, when one side is clearly the aggressor and committing wars crimes on a daily basis, being “neutral” is not a good look.
Hopefully someone will provide a non paywalled link. I thought this was an excellent article.
Gift article here.
Thank you!
I think this is actually a feature (fixed barrier to entry, a hard requirement of skin in the game) which greatly improves the quality of contributions on TikTok vs Twitter. For this reason alone, I find Brown TikTok far better than Brown Twitter ever was.
I get glimpses of Black TikTok as well, and it seems to be thriving. I think there is just a contingent of entrenched incumbents from Twitter who don't want to put in the work on a new platform now that the zeitgeist has shifted.
On TikTok, your follower count doesn't matter. You can have 100k followers, but if your videos aren't good, they won't get seen. Contrast this with Twitter where once you have 100k followers, you can post whatever low quality crap you want and you'll always get the same huge reach.
This may be the case but I think it's also got a lot to do with how much better Tiktok's algorithm is at adapting to what you (seem to) want to see when compared to Twitter. It's a lot easier to avoid "discourse" on Tiktok as a result in my experience. But I'm also white af so I don't have much experience with black or brown subcultures on either app.
I think the corners of Black Twitter I peeped in on would be way too raucous to vibe with the BeeHaw crowd tbh.
I don’t know anything about Beehaw but would these types of jokes be allowed on it.
Beehaw is basically fediverse Tildes in terms of its community. Actually, I'd say they're even more hostile towards Redditisms. You don't even get the advantage of being able to interact with the rest of Lemmy either because the instance owner decided to defederate from everyone else once Reddit shat the bed.
That being said, I can't really vouch for the fediverse in general at the moment. It's way too insecure and easy for malicious actors to compromise. Just two days ago, Lemmy World restricted registrations, disabled image uploads and shut down the Lemmyshitpost community because users (likely bots) from another newly-formed instance were spamming CSAM on it.
Yup this is exactly why I avoid anything that says "federated".
From what I know of it, it's annoying, inconvenient, insecure, hinders communication, and lacks moderation capabilities.
I don’t think they would be.
Sounds kind of lame then
Yeah lame, as opposed to this place with its thriving black user base and known tolerance for calling fat bitches fat 🙄🙄🙄
You got me there
I miss the snark of queer reddit, i get what you're saying. Sometimes the truth spoken to power needs some sharp-ass teeth.
Like the old school gawker. Before they rebranded to whatever lame hell scape they rebranded to last year.