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Linda Weide's avatar

Elon was raised in and benefitted from Apartheid. That is what formed him. He clearly has not transcended his upbringing but bowed to it and the White Supremacist world view that he seems to hold. That is what he has to offer Twitter: A racist, sexist, anti LGBTQ+ perspective, and hate for US government and nation. What has bothered me from the beginning about Twitter is that I have been noticing that children have shorter and shorter attention spans, and I have been teaching with adults who teach reading but don't read books themselves. It caters to a short attention span. Actually prior to 2002 my third and fourth grade students had great vocabularies and did not spend that much time on technology. They read books. They played outside. Then, after that I started noticing each year that my best readers were more like my medium readers had been, and there was just one child who would know the meanings of words. These would be the very linguistically gifted children. In 2005 I noticed this change because there were standard books I would read to my students, and in 2002 with challenging words I could still ask what does this mean and at least 3 or 4 hands would go up with at least one child having an accurate definition of the word, but slowly after that there was a change. From 2005-2008 I was not teaching. When I returned I noticed that none of my students ever knew the difficult or even more common words. They never knew any of the words that I asked them about. Every couple of years I might have one student who did. Then, Twitter appeared in 2006. I assume the creators realized that people were not reading as much and wanted to cater to that unwillingness to take time to read. People could say everything in a sound bite with Twitter. It lends itself to short sayings, which I think leads to more snarkiness. Nice for everyone with ADHD, but not for people who want to consume more deeply thought out information. My daughter assures me that one can write a longer thread and link it, but that is not what Twitter was created for. It was created for sound bites, which is a problem for our brains. It does not support brain growth. https://blog.scribd.com/unexpected-brain-benefits-of-reading/?utm_source=Email&utm_campaign=20221221_MKT_BAT_ALL_DecBlogNewsletter

I was surprised at how many people have jumped on the medium. Not the celebrities and Trump and Musk types who are jumping from one thought to the next lickety split, but deeper thinkers who publish longer pieces elsewhere. I also deplore the idea of likes and don't likes because it is a part of American behaviorist education that is just so demeaning. That simplistic way of controlling children is now a part of American and by extent worldwide corporate tech culture is bothersome. It is unhealthy for children and by extension probably unhealthy for adults. We should not be so simply manipulated. Call me old fashioned, but I was part of a working group that was looking at technology's effects on people's thought, and a lot of our younger colleagues just dropped out because they could not manage to read the books, since they are too busy consuming non-print medium. Twitter caters to not reading much. Tech seems to have added a lot of recruits to the right wing militia in this country during covid lockdowns where lots of lonely kids latched onto the dark side of the internet, which would be a normal thing for kids to do. Under Musk, Twitter is going to the dark side and at some point people have to decide whether they want to be with the dark side or leave it.

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LuluBelle's avatar

Back in the old days a few months ago BE (before Elon), you'd get a notification that twitter didn't like something you had tweeted, your account was frozen until you deleted the offending tweet and the second you did, you had your account back.

So, a couple of things. Either the warning and suspension system had coincidentally broken when Ms Lopez tweeted or Mush had a direct hand in banning her and it took him a few days to figure out how to cover his ass when people complained. Twitter is broken but my money's on Mush being a vindictive asshole.

This is like the high school bully being in charge of the school newspaper.

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