If everyone shuts up about racism, then racism will be worse. If everyone stopped talking about twitter, then twitter will die. It’s not the same thing at all. Not even close.
Comment on The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 8 months agoI dunno’, kinda’ sounds similar to, “racism would be over if tou’d just shut up about it.”
X and Elon don’t magically disappear because you choose to ignore them.
marswarrior@lemmy.world 8 months ago
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You are mixing “talking about Twitter” with “being on Twitter”. If nobody on Lemmy or Mastodon said a single word about Twitter ever again… it would still outnumber them by hundreds of millions users. I don’t like it, but that’s still how it is. But consequently, ragging on it is not going to recruit people who left for the Fediverse.
But if you mean making everyone on Twitter to shut up in general, well, easier said than done.
cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
My lesson from this is most people, even the ones who say they’re good, will continue using a system that’s clearly wrong if it because them.
Practically speaking nobody moved to Lemmy, and nobody moved to Mastodon. Nobody left Facebook after Cambridge Analytica.
I’m literally the only person I know IRL who actually boycotts or cares about these things.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yes overall but even then it’s not so cut and dry. Think of, say, queer artists who depends on this to have a living, or minority activists who need it to be heard, to push back against the same hate spreading across it. If they simply up and leave before building up an audience elsewhere they’ll just end up worse for it. For activists, even if they have other platforms, they still consider what will happen in the wider picture if a major platform like this is left to bigotry and toxicity unchallenged, and those who aren’t bothered by it.
Sometimes taking the moral high ground is a luxury. Given the way some people criticize the irony of minorities who still rely on it, I don’t think they really get how complicated the matter is.
marswarrior@lemmy.world 8 months ago
[deleted]TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Nah. That doesn’t make a bit of sense, that’s stretching those generalizations to the breaking point. How is talking negatively of it going to make it more appealing to people who already left mainstream social media out of dissatisfaction. Who do you think this person is who’s like “I had enough of Twitter, but now that they said it’s vile and falling apart I absolutely must go back there”?
Even if the average person on Facebook could vaguely feel interested in it as a talking point, which is already a strange logic, here it doesn’t seem likely or meaningfully impactful.
alianne@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The difference is that racists are usually racist due to a moral stance, not because it makes them money; ignoring them means we’ll hear about it less but it won’t actually go away. Clickbait/ragebait, on the other hand, isn’t a moral viewpoint - it’s meant to bring a person money via exposure/engagement, so less engagement leads to less money which leads to less bait because it’s no longer working.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I dunno’, you’d find plenty of economic justification if you go back and read why the confederacy got started. Or why Germany went a little crazy in early 1900’s…
While it is correct to logically dismiss the actual arguments of rage bait, it is purely foolish to pretend that it has no tangible effects worth counteracting all the same.
To say these things aren’t even worth talking about in general is akin stepping aside for bad actors to take over.
fruitleatherpostcard@lemm.ee 8 months ago
It’s not “x” it’s called Twitter.
This is a good case for deadnaming.TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Corporate deadnaming is the only good deadnaming.
Facebook also only deserves to be called Meta as a reminder that they rebranded into a failed trend and lost billions because of it.
RaincoatsGeorge@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
I dunno. Racism isn’t entirely manifested by one man. He’s just one more bucket of piss in a sea of piss. Fuck him. We can at any time choose to ignore him. Choose to ignore his shit app. He doesn’t matter to any equation, he’s just an annoying rich person struggling with their addiction to child pornography. Wups did I say the silent part out loud. Shit.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What you say is completely correct for engaging with his platform.
Not about not talking about the rise of bigoted morons in general. That is sticking your head in the sand.
lloram239@feddit.de 8 months ago
“racism would be over if tou’d just shut up about it.”
Well, that’s way more true than it is false. The way the left hyped up race as the single most important and defining feature of people wasn’t exactly helpful. The idea of racial realism should be deconstructed, not actively supported. I have literally never seen as much racism in my life as what the left has been doing in the last 10-15 years.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What the gell are you talking about? Acknowledging that black people and other minorities have had a hard time in the past that leads to present continued struggle IS NOT racism… It’s acknowledging reality.
What IS racist is saying the behavior is innate to the race, not that the race has consequently received the short end of the economic stick.
lloram239@feddit.de 8 months ago
Acknowledging that black people and other minorities have had a hard time in the past that leads to present continued struggle IS NOT racism…
That’s exactly what racism is. You ignore what actually happening to the individual and treat them all the same because of their skin color. White savior complex in action.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
If you cannot understand the difference between recognizing the past and making assumptions about specific people you donpt know … you are literally too stupid to understand racism or privilege. Congratulations on being pathetically stupid.
scarabic@lemmy.world 8 months ago
While some of the same words appear in these two things, they are nothing alike.
The debate over whether recognizing racism can help us eliminate it has nothing to do with an unhinged billionaire who uses shock tactics to generate PR, and the bottom-feeding publications who live on stoking our disgust with him.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
No, it’s very much similar. You’re saying don’t even talk about it, when the article is about how it is a corrupted service. A service that at least used to have global reach. If a service is a globally used resource, it’s kinda’ institutionalized.
Since when did ignoring institutionalized injustice ever fix it? Never. It never gets fixed in the dark.
scarabic@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s a corrupted service, therefore it’s a service, therefore it’s an institution, therefore it’s institutionalized injustice….
Feeling a little loose after all that stretching? I guess the policies of every website company in the world now constitute institutionalized injustice. I’ll use that phrase next time I’m appealing the Facebook modbot.
I wouldn’t say we should never talk about Twitter and it’s impact on our world. I will say it is a media circus which is Halle about far, far too often to its corrupt owners benefit.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Way to treat an association as an exact replica… I’m trying to put bread crumbs down, not rope them together. Stop pretending you do not know what an alegory is.
If you understand the general topic should not be shunned … why are you speaking on behalf of shunning it?
Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
And it would be similar to that if racism was a business that survived based on engagement.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I mean… Isn’t it? Racism is very self-perpetuating. Especially when it’s allowed over other forms of distasteful speech.
Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I don’t think so. Racism being self perpetuating means it will exist even if we stop talking about it and will probably just be worse because even well meaning folk can be racist if they’re not aware of it.
X on the other hand stops existing if we stop sending it traffic and just let it die.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Nah, self-perpetuating is not the same as spontaneously inevitable. Just like species can go extinct despite all life self-perpetuating in some way.
VikingHippie@lemmy.wtf 8 months ago
If you think it isn’t, you clearly haven’t been paying attention to all of racism in general and hypercapitalist neofascism in particular.