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Twitter

I used to blog a bit on Facebook and Twitter. They're not really blog applications but I used them that way, practicing writing about things both silly and serious. 

I withdrew from Facebook after the umpteenth time it was reported that they had lied about promoting controversial and false posts to drive more hits and to be paid by foreign sources to do so. On a personal level my mother suffers from dementia and she started believing more in her Facebook feed than reality; I just couldn't be a part of that system anymore.

I had used Twitter more to practice my jokes to be honest. The comedian Steven Wright has been a big influence on me over the years; his gift has been to craft terse jokes such as "I wouldn't want everything; where would you put it?" and I wanted to use the word limit on Twitter to hone my ability to turn a phrase. When Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016 by encouraging people to hate people of color, etc. I lost a lot of my sense of humor and stopped posting on Twitter, eventually closing the account to stop it from being hacked.

I don't like to try to guess people's motives from a distance; I don't believe in telepathy. I stand in amazement at Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter at a cost of billions of dollars. A different person might have used that money to help people; I know that at some point he bragged that he would use his wealth to end world hunger, and so that still rings in my ears as he takes down Twitter.

Twitter could be a place for hate speech but I have fond memories of its ability during the Arab Spring to support free speech as well. With proper management and moderation it would certainly continue to have that ability. Musk has fired enough people that kept Twitter functioning that I, like many others, expect it to shut down this calendar year.

I do hope people stop putting their faith in Musk. He's either incompetent or evil, perhaps both.

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