Reposted from Dilip Simeon’s blog
Elon Musk is the king of trolls in an age of troll politics / What better owner for Twitter than master of the ill-advised tweet?
Posted: 27 Apr 2022 07:43 PM PDT
Even while hammering out the final details of his £35bn ($44bn) purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk took some time out this weekend to tweet. He likes tweeting, does the world’s richest man, usually from what he calls his “porcelain throne” (that detail disclosed on Twitter, naturally enough). This one was a photo of Bill Gates, zeroing in on the 66-year-old’s modest paunch and placing it next to a cartoon of a pregnant man. To that ensemble, Musk added this sentence of supreme wit: “in case u need to lose a boner fast”…
Elon Musk, master of the ill-advised tweet? by Marina Hyde
Quite where we’ll be in six months’ time as far as Twitter is concerned remains tantalisingly unclear, but it seems difficult to imagine it will be either a more or less pleasant space. It’s a social media platform. I’m not sure what further evidence humanity needs before we cotton on to the idea that such a thing might be an intrinsically toxic concept. Of course, there will always be some people who think it just hasn’t been done right yet. Like communism, or a British version of The Daily Show.
Anyway, if Musk’s takeover goes through, he’ll assume control of a platform where the people on the right are incredibly angry about free speech, and those on the left are incredibly angry about hate speech. Which is to say: they have so much in common. As the tech visionary Jaron Lanier has long been excellent at pointing out, the best way to keep people on platforms is to make them angry. So the platforms are designed to make them angry…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/26/twitter-elon-musk-ill-advised-tweet-angry