Goodbye Twitter!

^[1]1,203 words

Twitter is done. After the suspension of then-sitting President Trump and successive ban waves, it’s obvious that Right-wingers have no future on the platform. What began as Left and Right competing for audiences on Twitter has ended with Twitter itself flexing its soy-infused muscles to purge all but a small and carefully curated number of high-profile Right-wing accounts. At one time it may have been possible to institute legal controls on digital communications infrastructure companies (so-called “big tech”) to ensure transparency, accountability, and freedom of speech and expression, including political or “hate” speech. Now that Twitter has spent all its remaining credibility getting Biden across the finish line and into the White House, that window is fully closed. Because of shadow banning, deboosting, and other harder-to-identify data manipulation, we have to assume that the outreach benefit of maintaining a presence on Twitter is negligible and that all Right-wing accounts are being kept in a digital ghetto of preaching to the converted. The only remaining utility Twitter has is to make a list of the gravestones to try and find the same people on Gab.

In a way, the decision has been made for us. If Twitter wants to be a space where there is no political debate outside of an ever-tightening noose, that is fine. It will simply cease to be relevant or meaningful to the majority of politically engaged users, both Left and Right, and hasten the day the platform dies by becoming a 280-character variation of print newspapers. The time has come for the Right-wing to lock horns with Twitter, not from inside the platform where our social networks can be monitored and viciously pruned by the ADL working hand-in-glove with Twitter Commissars, but from a competing platform, by which I mean Gab. With every cycle of “find my frens,” the time, energy, and accumulated social capital of Right-wing Twitter users are intentionally thrown away. It is completely pointless to continue trying to build up the next sandcastle only for it to be knocked down again on a whim.

Arguably, the entire purpose of Twitter is to bait Right-wingers into using it to ensure that our network never grows beyond their Petri dish. They can already count on the votes and physical obedience of their core constituents to inject themselves with experimental vaccines and violently attack mask non-wearers. Part of the real value of Twitter to the Left is the data provided by the aggregate Right-wing use of the site, allowing them to identify who is posting from where, and which memes, videos, and articles have the most traction and impact. By using Twitter, Right-wingers allow the Left to analyze how best to smother our baby in the crib. It’s all well and good starting fires on their platform that will take a few clicks of the Twitter Trust & Safety team to put out with a mass suspension, but the effort expenditure clearly favors Twitter. It’s just not worth it to carry on trying to meme to an audience that Twitter will never let you reach. Individually, every Right-winger appears to be incentivized to remain on Twitter. This is where they can find a (seemingly) larger immediate audience, despite the setbacks of harassment and suspensions. But on the whole, this individualism is robbing individual Right-wing users of their future on the web.

I hope this will be the one and only time I ask Right-wingers to change their main social media platform. With every great migration, our social network gets weaker before it becomes stronger by flourishing in the more favorable conditions. Some users will remain and won’t want to leave their audience, arguing that they are in a better position with the devil they know. Other useful individuals will peel off and join other spaces, where their social capital and exclusive stream of audience-attracting content is then squandered on far more niche sites that are not challengers to Twitter but its satellites. What matters when challenging a monopoly is momentum and picking up the accumulated audiences of vast numbers of content creators and conversationalists. Gab has an established personality and known, easily marketed brand and offers the necessary social interaction that commercially slanted publishing platforms don’t. It’s meme-friendly whilst being a hub of actual people rather than an anonymous message board. Everyone knows the green frog, and as the platform hasn’t fully taken off yet, we can hijack it on the runway.

We have to act as one bloc. Twitter is testing us to see if we have the solidarity with each other to challenge their platform by investing ourselves in and taking control of a competitor, or whether we will keep going back for another beating out of a masochistic urge to make yet another faux-noble last stand. Torba’s personal Warhammer-themed variant of Christian Crusaderism will put off some, and to those people, I am asking please, put aside your doubts, let him be eccentric, and exploit the neutrality that Gab is offering to do your own thing and be yourself. Twitter is deeply enmeshed in the alphabet soup of deep state intelligence agencies and Jewish-run NGOs, and anyone who is still there is offering themselves up as a plaything.

The only way to win this game is to be an uncompromising minority which forces everyone else to behave on our terms — by posting exclusively to Gab, others will have to sign up to Gab to follow, and in turn, this snowball will become an avalanche that will flatten Twitter’s ability to control the conversation (the wider Right is being forced off Twitter anyway, so let them follow us to a space where we can freely disabuse them of their cuckservatism). Small accounts should migrate immediately to Gab, creating a sizeable new audience that can rival Twitter for engagement and support. Big accounts, many of which are well-known outside of Twitter and aren’t that dependent on it, should make Twitter pay by switching to this new, unthrottled audience and bringing in more moderates. Eventually, even Leftists will follow for want of an argument. Torba is a businessman who wants to be a heavyweight in the world of digital infrastructure, and if we become the driving force of his site, we can leverage this dependency to make sure we get the transparency, platform protections, and utilities that we want.

Twitter needs us, but we do not need them. If they didn’t need us to support their platform, there wouldn’t be a single Right-winger with an account remaining. Their aim is to keep a pet population of implicit White Nationalists, not so many that we can achieve a critical mass on their platform, but enough that challengers are bled out. It’s a toxic relationship and it’s time to walk away. 

Goodbye Twitter! ^[4]

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