I wouldn't call it "surreal" at all, I'd call it "completely expected" given who runs that platform

Quit. Using. Twitter.

O’Reilly said if he did not get his account back it would be “personally, quite annoying but professionally quite depressing” as Twitter was his route into his current profession as a journalist and author. He used it as a “shop front” in ways, he said.

“I was very, very reluctant to be a Twitter doomer because it had done so much for me... But it’s really at the point where it doesn’t really work in practical terms. It is not as useful as an object as it used to be. It incentivises lots of extremely negative and hateful speech and has really made that a big kind of calling card of its business for the last year or two... that you can go on there and say anything.”

Fediverse is waiting.

Social networks that do this should lose any safe harbor provisions. Government are so fucking far behind with basic common sense.

Well that's actually exactly what I'd expect

Séamas gave us of the funniest story threads I've ever read on that cursed site: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/992006545473966082.html

The suspension cited platform manipulation and spam as its reasoning, which he wrote in his appeal that he had nothing to do with.

So the only conclusion we can draw here is that writing an article critical of Twitter because it's overrun with (paid) spambots now constitutes "platform manipulation."

Elon in 2022: I wanna get rid of all the spambots!

Elon in 2024: You're banned for being mean to the spambots!

First off, just call it Twitter.

Second, get off Twitter!

It's time for news orgs and journalists to say a) "we're hosting our content on our own Mastodon server and that will be the source of truth for federated platforms (eventually including Threads and Bluesky)", b) "we will mirror the content across non-federated social media platforms that support free and fair reporting".

In other words give Twitter the middle finger and make the content available everywhere.

Musk is only a free speech absolutist for the speech he supports.

I just wish that a free-speech-absolutist-billionaire would buy the platform so things like this wouldn’t happen anymore. He could even rename it something cool (like ‘Y’ or ‘Z’) to get some street-cred with edgy middleschoolers..

Clearly Seamas has not spent much time on message boards.

All sad jokes aside: This really is a problem. Ignoring the evangelizing for a moment, we have been watching someone who owes his entire life to apartheid destroying the most democratized "free speech" platform for over a year now. And, with the increasing wariness of venture capital to burn money for a decade at a time, we are unlikely to see anything like it ever agian. Because bluesky and threads started with corporate interests and Mastodon has serious privacy concerns due to the amount of data that instance owners have access to.

This has very much been a "something has died forever" kind of experience.

Has this "journalist" been in a coma since twitters purchase? One of the first things done was the removal of 'elonjet' and a plethora of elon critics

STOP USING TWITTER, DUMBASS.

Wtf did they expect from 2024 Twitter?

"Free speech absolutist", my ass...

"Liberal finds it surreal that neoliberalism creates fascism"

Such a weird thing! :D

Anyone surprised by Musky at this point only has themselves to blame.

The author’s account had over 100,000 followers and was around 14 years old, he said

Well there's your problem, it's 14 so Daddy Musk started taking an interest in fucking it.

How is this surreal? Journalists critical of Musk/Twitter have been being banned since he bought it.

Is this journalist really so self involved he thought it was OK they all got nuked as long as he didn't?

Technofeudalism

Insert "It's a private platform. He can do whatever he wants" comment

If you ever question whether Eløn is actually a free speech absolutist, we can all point to cases like this.

Imagine even having a twatter account in 2024!

Yeah what did he expect. It's not a people's platform anymore. It's the owner's. Better he be off and do his own thing elsewhere. Find better fields!

Llama still inhabiting former llama enclosure (recently and very publicly converted to a tiger pen) confused by strange occurrence of tiger bites.

We need a big exodus of media then the platform would be dead for sure.

Have a lovely and ribald toast for a Musk stroke.