Nobody Has to Talk to Bigots Online

As the world’s richest man loses his grip on the audience, for which he paid the equivalent of the GDP of a developing nation, the propaganda machine, thinly veiled as pushback about Bluesky’s takeover, is calling the new-old app an echo chamber. The internet is not old; most millennials are older than the World Wide Web, but forget we had a life without it because it has become so much of our daily routine. With that said, it is important to be mindful of the type of energy being regularly consumed via a connection to the world that fits in the palm of the hand. Social media started out in chatrooms, lifelong (or at least they seemed like it at the time) connections were made across the country, and sometimes across the globe, by just responding to ‘age/gender/location.’

It was all pretty simple back then; rarely were there internet beefs.

Even when Myspace and its successor, Facebook, came around, their initial days may not have been completely free of social strife. However, it was nothing more than what came with the interactions of people in your expanding yet still intimate and already familiar community. You were largely safe from views that were so dangerous, the person knew it was too dangerous to even post about, or maybe that was because you still needed a college email address to access Facebook; two things can be true. The riff-raff stayed on the dark web. But alas, Mark Zuckerberg sold his soul for his I.P.O. and allowed hate to not only flourish on his site but go unchecked and even promoted. Once sold, Twitter’s new law was lawlessness, even down to the new name and branding, which is indicative of a child who had to buy his friends and wants to show the world that he is bad to the bone.

In response to Xitter’s now unrepentant platforming of the alt-right, many of Bluesky’s former Xitter users are deciding to ignore and/or block far-right users they encounter on Bluesky, essentially suffocating their presence from many users algorithms, the opposite of how the algorithm on Xitter functioned.

Far-right users are so upset that they even made Xitter accounts and hundreds of xweets dedicated to the liberals on Bluesky. Intra-app beef is an insane level of obsession, so holding the culture responsible for this vitriol accountable is important, and that comes with starving it. The same demographic that could not be asked to cover up their mouths to literally save their own lives would be a bit confused when others exercise the right to not entertain what comes out of those mouths.

When it comes to calling it an echo chamber, what dissenting views did the GOP have at the Republican National Convention?

Allowing something to have a platform is legitimizing its stance.  A difference of opinion is not a matter of who should and who should not have rights. Hate is not argued from a deprived perspective. There is no deprived perspective of slavery and genocide as bad because there is nothing ethical or fact-based to legitimize them as being good. Arguing that climate change is not real is not even arguing from a deprived perspective. Any argument against the ethical treatment of other human life or against scientific data is not legitimate enough to even receive a platform, yet giving it one and arguing against something that can be disproven by data is giving it the same credence as the data and ethically backed stance. 

Additionally, people are not required to acknowledge what seeks to destroy them; people are not required to walk into a fire just to prove they can withstand the heat. Those who champion or even condone giving bigotry a platform have to ask themselves, are they against terrorism, or are they against terrorism when it is not white people? People would be up in arms and forgetting all about their free speech rhetoric if Al-Qaeda got a Xitter account, but somehow Charlie Kirk gets to flap his very large gums on the internet without recourse and make money while doing it.  In a country that has a serious mass shooter problem, one would think that not only would not giving these factions a platform—which promotes the type of white nationalist violence that comes out at the end of a lone shooter’s barrel—be important, but squashing them would also be a priority.

When there is no threshold, there is nothing stopping the extremity of hate; the cruelty will have no bottom, and the party backed by Christianity has put up no fight to continue to not do what Jesus would do. At this rate, Musk would give Hitler a platform, were he still alive, since he has demonstrated that he has no problem with rampant antisemitism, islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism and general misinformation that aggrandizes the far right; these are the same tenets of Nazi Germany.

Unironically, the same people who are taking books away because of the harm they allegedly cause children are miffed that other adults don’t want to read their actual hate. Taking away the block function was a violation of boundaries. Still, of course, the same people who champion “your body, my choice” would not have a problem with crossing borders, I mean entering the safe space of others without permission.

Parasocial relationships are concerning but forcing people to have them is worse; social media apps do not have the right to dictate our emotions, and so many people not understanding this is worrisome. 

The right is fearmongering with the notion that if everyone does not have a platform then no one will. That ideology plays on residue from a collective and rightful PTSD of absolute rule by despotic monarchs. However, many people forget that those same liberating revolutionaries turned around and still engaged in oppression, I’m talking to you Russia, I’m talking to you, the United States, I’m talking to you France, I’m talking to you China, I’m talking to you Germany. It is not even like the political leadership that is fueled by hate has a history of victory, the American Confederacy, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, are all some of history’s biggest L- takers, so to even use their brand as the mother of your movement is an unnatural allegiance to losers.

Nothing good can ever be born of evil, and people don’t have to stand around and endure evil for the sake of fairness, especially when fairness has never been associated with evil. It’s a sad day when the party of the moral majority is far more concerned with why they can’t say hateful things than why they shouldn’t.