De-twitting Twitter

More from my Substack archive. Why not get 'em fresh, for FREE? See right...

The exodus from Twitter since Elon Musk bought it may be exaggerated. This report says 875,00 have deactivated their accounts and another half-million have been suspended.

In context, that’s a ‘flee’-bite. According to this source, Twitter has nearly 400 million users globally and half of those are daily users. Even with those numbers, the Blue Bird is merely the 15th most popular social network.

The writer also says:

10% of Twitter users are responsible for 92% of the tweets from all U.S. users, meaning there’s a particularly active group of users publishing a large chunk of content.

If those are the category leaving (and that’s not clear), maybe it will affect advertising revenue but otherwise are we going to miss them? After all, who’s going? Censorious hysterics who cannot cope with alternative views? Perhaps Mastodon is getting the fleas and Twitter will keep the dog.

There may be an opportunity here. Since we’re in a mass-spying and data automation age, there may be a way to scrape the user details of the screamers to make a list of those to be watched for totalitarian tendencies.

Similarly, years ago there was a regular ad on TV for a small, agile Peugeot car, showing it nipping through building sites and concrete pipes and generally zooming about recklessly. Soon after I noticed that dumb drivers with their d*cks on the accelerator were in such vehicles. I told a friend that the police and vehicle licensing agency could simply make a note of people making purchases in response to such ads, as a forewarning of dangerous drivers; perhaps shove nine points on their licenses to deter them from copying the driving style seen on the boob tube.

The immaturity and lack of impulse control are everywhere. I look on with concern at the way that e.g. universities have given in to intolerant wokies and could wish that my alma mater Oxford would rusticate such people as incapable of benefiting from a liberal education.

But no, that would be to play the game that governments and their agencies have been using against us for years. When Oxford students staged a demo march against Margaret Thatcher in the early 70s there were grey men perched up lampposts taking photographs of the crowd; seeing what kind of regime was allowed into power twenty-odd years later I think they can’t have done the follow-up work properly.

Best to take a laid-back approach, then. Maybe a lot of the noisy ones will grow up.

Or maybe they’ll take over and we’ll find out what happens when spoiled children get big.

Meanwhile, I’ve just registered with TruthSocial to watch Orange Man’s progress. It’s still a minnow - 2 million users so far - but it only started just over a year ago.

Will I be tainted by Evil Thoughts? Unclean, unclean!