"Of course, with a broadcast social network like X, everyone is both a patron and an owner of sorts."

"Followers can feel like a kind of currency, built up over years: Some people don’t leave the bar, because they’re invested and don’t want to dump their shares. Other people don’t leave, because the alternative hangouts aren’t enticing enough. Some simply don’t want to give the Nazis the satisfaction of successfully driving them out. There is plenty of commentary, even among users of other platforms, about how Threads is bloodless (and owned by Mark Zuckerberg), Mastodon is inscrutable, and Bluesky is humorless.... If a billionaire bought one of your local haunts... brought back many of the people who’d been banned for harassing other regulars, eliminated basic rules of decency... taking your business elsewhere would be perfectly rational. This is essentially what’s happened on X.... A critical mass of the nation’s politicians, news outlets, and major brands regularly post content for free... This platform is owned by the world’s richest man, a conspiracy theorizing GOP mega-donor who still holds a position in the Trump administration.... Let’s pause to sit with the absurdity of these facts...."

I'm sitting with the Atlantic article by Charlie Warzel, "What Are People Still Doing on X? Imagine if your favorite neighborhood bar turned into a Nazi hangout." 

Here's how I'd act when my favorite neighborhood bar turns into a Nazi hangout:

"Who is going to buy TikTok?"

Writes Charlie Warzel in "Welcome to the TikTok Meltdown/The ban is a disaster, even if you support it" (The Atlantic)(also noting that courts might find the ban unconstitutional and that China may block selling the algorithm).

At the heart of the government’s case...  is that TikTok is the beating heart of a social-media industrial complex that mines our data and uses them to manipulate our behavior....why, if the government believes this is true, should anyone have access to these tools?... 

One analysis of TikTok’s U.S. market values the app at $100 billion—a sum that rather quickly narrows down the field of buyers.... 

[A]s we’ve seen from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, putting the fate of a social-media platform into the hands of a few highly motivated individuals can quickly turn into a nightmare.

"It can no longer be denied"/"Free speech" is right wing.

I'm trying to read "Twitter Is a Far-Right Social Network/It can no longer be denied" by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic.

Truth Social, a website backed in part by Donald Trump, says it encourages “an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating on the basis of political ideology.” This language is indistinguishable from the way that [Tucker] Carlson spoke of [Elon] Musk’s Twitter, arguing that “there aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech,” and that the site is “the last big one remaining in the world.” 

If it acts like a right-wing website and markets itself as a right-wing website, it just might be a right-wing website....

Warzel is hoping for the worst for Twitter, and it's a hope that we've seen since the beginning of the Musk takeover. A free speech policy will drive out the liberals and lefties, and without lefties to kick around, righties won't be happy:

"We have a different policy than, I think, Twitter on this. I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth..."

"... of everything that people say online. Private companies probably shouldn't be, especially these platform companies, shouldn't be in the position of doing that."

Said Mark Zuckerberg, quoted at Fox News. Links to Fox News never seem to work, so I apologize in advance for this bad link. Why does Fox News not play well with social media?

Anyway... I'm glad to hear that from Zuckerberg. I love Zuckerberg's self-effacing term "these platform companies." I have long argued that these platform companies should uphold the free speech values that the law requires government to uphold. (Here's my 2011 argument with Bob Wright on the subject.)

Meanwhile, Trump is choosing the worst way to fight for freedom of speech — governmental suppression: "Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen." That's a tweet, quoted at CNN. From the CNN article:

These pro-Trump "memes" are "meant to be trivial pieces of online ephemera that signal the president’s righteousness over the 'libs.'"

"CarpeDonktum, a stay-at-home dad from Kansas who popularized this style of pro-Trump meme and who has received multiple invitations to meet President Trump at the White House, described these memes to me as 'boomer humor,' aimed at aging, hyperaggressive political posters on Facebook. In other words, these memes are empty-headed hyperpartisan sharebait — grist for the algorithmic mills. And the rudimentary composition of these clips is a feature, not a bug. That the memes look childish provides a veneer of acceptability — so that they can be shared without getting pulled from social networks. The memes’ creators and sharers can giddily watch the president dispatching his enemies while claiming the video is just a funny gag. When confronted, they can throw hands up in the air and cry, 'Snowflake!' In their version of reality, the uproar over this video is more proof that overly sensitive liberals are 'triggered.'... Indeed, MAGAland began relentlessly mocking the Times report on the video within minutes of its publishing. '23 paragraphs, about a meme lol. Yikes this is psychotic,' someone wrote on Twitter. 'These types of articles is why the meme was made,' another replied.... Taking the meme video seriously does the unfortunate work of amplifying the clip.... Responding to the trollish world of MAGA memes is a lot like arguing with a child...."

From "The Violent Trump Video Is Dumb, and That’s the Point/The absurdity of memes like the one shared widely on Sunday evening gives cover to their creators" by NYT opinion writer Charlie Warzel, who ends with the assertion that these memes should be taken very seriously and analyzed prominently because they are part of one big phenomenon of "political tensions and polarization." If it's all one big thing, and the big thing is important, then any trivial component is also important.

There must be a Greek word for that kind of logic. It's not necessarily a fallacy.

Note: Though CarpeDonktum is quoted in that column, he's not the source of that very violent "Kingsmen" meme that is in the news this week.