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Twitter. What a trash fire it’s become. It’s not bad enough that Elon Musk bought over the platform and started firing people without a care for labour laws or the importance of their roles in the company; the guy is also openly playing to a gleeful gallery of American right-wingers. As this writer observed in their article, Twitter is now akin to a “goddamned Nazi pub”.
Over on Mastodon, where many a distressed Twitter refugee roams, I’ve seen comments along the lines of “if you’re still on Twitter, you’re as good as a collaborator”. Social networks need engagement, so if you’re still engaging on that birdsite, then you’re enabling its dive-bomb into hell.
I see their point. But a part of me resents it too. I’m Singaporean, half a world away from the United States, with no desire to be a participant in the shitshow that is US politics. And I’ve generally had a net positive experience with Twitter — it’s allowed me to reach a greater number of people to talk about human rights, politics and oppression in my country than I would have been able to connect with otherwise. It’s also been a significant part of my work as a freelance journalist, linking me to editors and peers around the world in ways that sparked interesting collaborations and snagged me paying work. It was never a perfect platform, but in an ideal world I would love to keep using Twitter in the same way I have for the best part of a decade now.
And yet. I, and many others like me who live in authoritarian environments, end up caught between our oppressive governments and this US-centric bullshit. It’s really prompted me to think even more than usual about the uneasy position I occupy online.