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also nationalizing Twitter would have caused an international diplomatic crisis the same way nationalizing Google would. they're... reality engines for large swaths of the world.

twitter's userbase isn't even that big; now, facebook...

Yeah. "Wouldn't it be nice if we could have the platonic ideal of a social media site? But we don't so I guess I have no choice but to party with antisemites" is not the winning video premise Adam seems to think it is

Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a lot of Adam Conover arguments, where I'm with him a lot of the way, but come to completely different conclusions. Twitter was very good, for a long time! But it also always had problems that wouldn't be more tractable if it were a publicly owned service.

Also lmao yeah the whole idea of nationalizing it now, when it's in the private hands of a petty asshole who already ruined it and chased of a large portion of the userbase, is laughable, to put it mildly.

these definitely match up with all the critiques we've ever heard of conover. lots of good when it's not discussing like, big, structural things - his whole show "the g word" was completely wrapped up in that specific problem of being unable to parse a world "truly better" than one incrementally improved from the current state of things.

Adam C is so very much the perfect "progressive liberal". He recognizes the problems as they really are... and thinks they're either Eternal And Intractable or can be solved with some neoliberal lever twiddling

"Elon Musk is ruining/has ruined Twitter as a platform, but we can't leave Twitter because that's where the audience is so there's nothing to do but "
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"Elon Musk is ruining/has ruined Twitter as a platform, but we can't leave Twitter because that's where my audience is so there's nothing to do but"

i wish there was some way to make something a public good without tying it down to one specific nation's government apparatus. oh well.

at this point i can't take anyone's opinion on twitter seriously if they're still actively using twitter. i don't mean to be crass but it really does feel like the reasoning of an abused spouse or an addict. everyone has been immersed in this status quo for so long that they don't even see how deranged and toxic the idea of a single everything site for the entire world to use simultaneously is anymore

I actually commented in the video that there are plenty of options and it's just a matter of picking on to leave. So yeah, I agree, we need to be louder about how we don't actually need Twitter.

Not to mention, wouldn't a nationalized, US government-run Twitter or facebook be under a much stricter interpretation of first amendment rules than any private version? I mean, IIRC there was a case not too long ago that determined that government accounts and pages aren't even allowed to block or mute people because they're obligated to be accessible to their constituents.

Thing is most forms of online abuse and hate speech aren't strictly illegal, so i feel like the people calling for these platforms to become gov't entities are in for something much worse than anything they could've imagined, at least for pre-Elon twitter.

i find that this sort of discussion, framed in your final 3 choices, is extremely common in left-ish? progressive? media - podcasts, youtube videos, pop nonfic books, whatever. it drives me insane. the whole work is about the status quo and option 1, then a smile towards the bright future of the "have your cake and eat it too" option 2 in the closing lines/chapters (with no exploration of how that might be possible), and completely ignore option 3, the one that requires changes to how things are done.

cohost asked me if i would like to see youtubes and i said yes. instant regret

I have thought a tooon about this stuff and yeah I think any form of nationalization is not a serious proposal, and 99.9% of the people offering it would back away from it at the trivial thought experiment of a Trump 2024 win - hmm, that guy, in charge of twitter's festering not-quite-dead-yet carcass? Yeah, no.

What I do think would work is a carefully set up internationally accountable nonprofit, in the mold of Wikipedia. Which is not to say that wikipedia doesn't have tons of cultural issues that most of its volunteer editors could tell you all about, but WP is at least as socially important (if not as powerful, in the various ways twitter was acknowledged to be powerful back in its heyday) as twitter and it has managed to keep its head above water in an incredibly turbulent sea of competing geopolitical-cultural forces.

The funny thing is that in a lot of respects (but "total expenses" probably not being one of them), a non-shit version of twitter should have lower overhead than wikipedia. You could basically roll back all the terrible bullshit Musk did to it and be within spitting distance of a feature complete version you could call "beta" and missing some moderation features. Twitter as a piece of software could basically be "finished" and do just about everything its users want it to do if it didn't have to turn a profit - all the "likes are now florps, timeline goes sideways" bullshit was the product of the Dorsey administration's rudderless R&D churn. The ongoing costs of content moderation and hosting would be the main thing a Twitter Foundation would need to put out the hat for during fundraising season. And I think it'd probably do fine for revenue if the entity asking for money was more like WP or NPR than Musk's incredibly inept grift.

Everything that would be fraught and politicized about a nonprofit (no really, actually nonprofit not all this neolib market-focused bullshit) Twitter is already fraught and politicized about Wikipedia (eg what's on Xi Jinping's page and who gets to write it). You would need to build the team very carefully and monitor its ideology, and it would be under constant attack from undemocratic forces of every stripe, but again this is true of multiple currently existing entities.

My best case scenario for twitter's epilogue after Musk finishes defiling it and sells off its corpse would be converting it into this sort of entity. I don't have much confidence that'll happen but it's what should happen, dammit.

The weird thing about this video is that he talks about the history of governmental intervention of the media...but the U.S. government really hasn't done anything analogous to his solution. They've broken up monopolies, nationalized the airwaves, and created public broadcasters, but there's not really a precedent for nationalizing an existing telecommunications or media company, as far as I know. I feel like breaking up Twitter and Facebook into multiple companies that compete and are required to interoperate would be the action that has the most historical parallels. I'm not sure it's a good idea, but it at least has more promise than nationalizing Twitter.

In fairness, I guess Conover hints at creating a new publicly funded social network, but he doesn't really elaborate on it, and it contradicts with his "Twitter is essential" argument.

Tumblr will never die (not that I've ever used it).

I watched it when it was new and my overall feeling was that it had the aura of someone making excuses for something he wasn't going to stop doing. He needed to keep using twitter so he needed to make a case for why using twitter is the best way to fix twitter. Consider the dismissal of using Mastodon, as a 'thing for nerds,' which

like

you're Adam Conover.