The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 764 points – The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X
bloomberg.com

The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X::The former Twitter is incentivizing violent content, which will only become worse to stand out to users.

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Then stop already. Stop mentioning the name. Stop posting articles about it. Stop sharing articles about it on other social media.

You know what's immoral? Posting ragebait articles about a platform because you know users will engage.

I dunno', kinda' sounds similar to, "racism would be over if you'd just shut up about it."

X and Elon don't magically disappear because you choose to ignore them.

And it would be similar to that if racism was a business that survived based on engagement.

I mean... Isn't it? Racism is very self-perpetuating. Especially when it's allowed over other forms of distasteful speech.

I don't think so. Racism being self perpetuating means it will exist even if we stop talking about it and will probably just be worse because even well meaning folk can be racist if they're not aware of it.

X on the other hand stops existing if we stop sending it traffic and just let it die.

Nah, self-perpetuating is not the same as spontaneously inevitable. Just like species can go extinct despite all life self-perpetuating in some way.

The people on Lemmy are likely to agree not to use it, and that just makes it more stupid to say, "don't talk about it.", since it won't further its demise at all.

Well, it seems like racism has unfortunately failed to go extinct so I'm not quite sure what you're getting at there but I'm probably missing something.

I don't think everyone has agreed not to use it? The more it gets talked about and spread the more people are drawn to the platform. Why do you think Musk has successfully made sure the site has been in the headlines constantly? I'm not saying we have to all stop talking about it and pretend it doesn't exist. But maybe we don't need multiple articles every day posted across multiple communities.

Anyway, doesn't really matter what I think. It keeps getting posted and upvoted so I guess we'll just have to live with it.

People are not drawn to the platform in a positive way by talking about it negatively on Lemmy...

It's like you idiots take basic expressions like, "any attention is good attention" and turn it in to a fucking axiom for life. It IS NOT TRUE in all contexts. Fucking grow up and realize generalities are SPECIFICALLY NOT TRUE in all cases. Ever. Generalities are always fucking stupid to use to judge specific occurrences unless it is a quintessential example. Which very VERY few things are quintessential examples of, "any attention is good attention.".

Something that's self-perpetuating doesn't extinguish without being actively stamped out. Noticing it's still around is the most basic observation that means nothing about it except that it's still an existant problem.

I mean sure, people aren't drawn to it in a positive way but advertiser's don't really care how you're drawn as long as you're drawn.

As for the rest of your comment I'm not really sure how to respond to be honest. Doesn't seem to relate to our conversation but good to get off your chest I guess.

Unlike systemic racism though this conversation isn't self perpetuating so I'm going to peace out and let it die like I wish everyone would do with X.

Have a good one and might catch you around in the next post about X. We're overdue for a new one by now I'm sure.

If you think it isn't, you clearly haven't been paying attention to all of racism in general and hypercapitalist neofascism in particular.

If everyone shuts up about racism, then racism will be worse. If everyone stopped talking about twitter, then twitter will die. It's not the same thing at all. Not even close.

You are mixing "talking about Twitter" with "being on Twitter". If nobody on Lemmy or Mastodon said a single word about Twitter ever again... it would still outnumber them by hundreds of millions users. I don't like it, but that's still how it is. But consequently, ragging on it is not going to recruit people who left for the Fediverse.

But if you mean making everyone on Twitter to shut up in general, well, easier said than done.

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The difference is that racists are usually racist due to a moral stance, not because it makes them money; ignoring them means we'll hear about it less but it won't actually go away. Clickbait/ragebait, on the other hand, isn't a moral viewpoint - it's meant to bring a person money via exposure/engagement, so less engagement leads to less money which leads to less bait because it's no longer working.

I dunno', you'd find plenty of economic justification if you go back and read why the confederacy got started. Or why Germany went a little crazy in early 1900's...

While it is correct to logically dismiss the actual arguments of rage bait, it is purely foolish to pretend that it has no tangible effects worth counteracting all the same.

To say these things aren't even worth talking about in general is akin stepping aside for bad actors to take over.

It’s not “x” it’s called Twitter.
This is a good case for deadnaming.

Corporate deadnaming is the only good deadnaming.

Facebook also only deserves to be called Meta as a reminder that they rebranded into a failed trend and lost billions because of it.

I dunno. Racism isn’t entirely manifested by one man. He’s just one more bucket of piss in a sea of piss. Fuck him. We can at any time choose to ignore him. Choose to ignore his shit app. He doesn’t matter to any equation, he’s just an annoying rich person struggling with their addiction to child pornography. Wups did I say the silent part out loud. Shit.

What you say is completely correct for engaging with his platform.

Not about not talking about the rise of bigoted morons in general. That is sticking your head in the sand.

Well kinda, except for these articles that pop now and then in my timeline, I haven't heard of XformerlyTwitter for a while.

It was fun for a few weeks, joking about what bulls**t idea Musk had during the weekend with colleagues, but after a while the joke was a bit repetitive.

It's not news because he joked about it. It's news because he's flippantly doing it with production.

While some of the same words appear in these two things, they are nothing alike.

The debate over whether recognizing racism can help us eliminate it has nothing to do with an unhinged billionaire who uses shock tactics to generate PR, and the bottom-feeding publications who give it to him by stoking our disgust.

No, it's very much similar. You're saying don't even talk about it, when the article is about how it is a corrupted service. A service that at least used to have global reach. If a service is a globally used resource, it's kinda' institutionalized.

Since when did ignoring institutionalized injustice ever fix it? Never. It never gets fixed in the dark.

I understand the concept of not feeding trolls, but do not misjudge and accidentally ask people to ignore villains.

It’s a corrupted service, therefore it’s a service, therefore it’s an institution, therefore it’s institutionalized injustice….

Feeling a little loose after all that stretching? I guess the policies of every website company in the world now constitute institutionalized injustice. I’ll use that phrase next time I’m appealing the Facebook modbot.

I wouldn’t say we should never talk about Twitter and it’s impact on our world. I will say it is a media circus which is paraded about far, far too often to its corrupt owners benefit. And it needs to have less attention than it is getting like a fire needs less air.

Way to treat an association as an exact replica... I'm trying to put bread crumbs down, not rope them together. Stop pretending you do not know what an alegory is.

If you understand the general topic should not be shunned ... why are you speaking on behalf of shunning it?

I answered that. Last paragraph. Stop spinning wild extrapolations out of your ass for a second and just read some hard text.

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I'm sure if we just ignore rich and powerful people, they'll go away.

They won't. But complaining about them on Lemmy and Bloomberg is empowering them.

I get your point that major media outlets constantly talking about them is empowering them, but pretending that Lemmy talking about it has any effect whatsoever is vastly overestimating how consequential this place is.

I know a lot of people here are just sick to hear of the matter but lets not pretend that not talking about it is a moral stance.

Twitter has millions of users. Not talking about its issues clearly won’t solve the problem.

It is a sight to behold. There is a certain class of people that don’t know who they are without Twitter because they measure their worth in followers and whatever influence that brings them. They are definitely going through all the stages of grief. Many of those types work in the media, hence all the articles hemming and hawing about whether to stay on Twitter or not.

For those of us that don’t have our egos entangled with the site, the writing was on the wall pretty early on. Twitter, or X, is dead and not worth our time. I’m sure those of us on Lemmy are especially capable of sniffing out the moment a social network turns sour.

Back before Apollo was killed I had the words “Elon” and “Trump” filtered out. I just never saw these rage posts in the first place. Man, I’d love to see that feature in a Lemmy client. Anyone know if it exists?

Posting ragebait articles about a platform because you know users will engage.

Lol irony.

The moral case for just shutting the hell up about X finally for fucks sake.

I'll shut up about it when it quits being relevant.

Is it relevant? Maybe I'm just being a grumpy old man but literally the only time I ever think about it is when it's posted about on here.

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This is your daily reminder to engage and boost Twitter alternatives such as Mastodon. It's not enough to ignore Twitter. We must build communities to draw in users, show them social media can exist without Elon or Zuck. Only when good alternatives exist, with content and people sought after, do users feel safe to abandon old platforms.

Mastodon, Firefish, Misskey, Sharkey. There really are a lot of interesting options. Mastodon seems to be the most popular though.

Firefish is my favourite, the design is fantastic, and I can read all of Mastodon on it. Very enjoyable and everyone is quite welcoming.

I made an account on Firefish as well. A bit of an adjustment after Mastodon. But my Mastodon account has been untouched since.

I think it's just a very pretty design! For some reason I can't explain it's adorable.

I get that. I feel it still needs a bit of polish. It's amazing but has some rough edges to work out. Sadly it probably won't catch up to Mastodon. Mastodon has too much of a head start. The nice thing about the fediverse is that it doesn't matter though. I can use the less popular option and still connect with the popular one.

Mastodon is never going to be as addictive without that algorithm. You can't just replace one with the other when what you're hooked on is the outage. What we really need here is regulation.

Can we all just boycott anything having to do with Musk/Twitter? I just want a browser extension that will automatically prevent me from going to a site that has any sort of links or anything related to twitter. Your blog also links to your Twitter account? Fuck you, I'm not reading it. Your news story references a tweet from somebody? Fuck you I'm not reading it. Your Lemmy post talks about Musk or Twitter? Fuck you, I'm not reading it. I just want all mention of Musk or Twitter or X completely erased from the internet. It may unfortunately impact any reference to anything else 'X' related, but that's a small price to pay for a Musk-free life.

Devil's advocate, it should be amplified as much as possible, because it reminds the public that billionaires are not inherently intelligent nor worthy of their money.

Is there any app for Lemmy that can filter by keyword? I don't want to read about Elon and Trump multiple times a day. With some Kanye, Zuckerberg and Tate sprinkled in.

I already know they suck and 99% of the time they are mentioned it isn't even relevant or is about social media platforms I don't use.

Problem is you'd also block all the older articles from when twitter was only a mudpit and not a hellhole

Oh no, all those articles from the Trump presidency where Trump posted something asinine and everybody freaked out about it, whatever shall I do?

Even better idea, everyone order a starlink then do a return. Will temp cost you $300 but free return shipping at spacex expense

SpaceX is an amazing company. I don't want to punish SpaceX.

It's less than a quarter the cost to get to space now, because of SpaceX

There are lots of browser extensions that can block any site you want to block. I use Block Site on Firefox but there's plenty to choose from, just have a search.

So, basically you want to stick your head in the sand and pretend things aren't happening.

No, I'd rather read about the important things that are happening. Twitter is not important and the only thing that will finally get all these other companies to finally drop twitter is if it starts hurting their bottom line and reduces clicks and reads. If there's a coordinated campaign to block Twitter, it could finally just remove it from the internet.

you're not saving the world complaining online about twitter bro.

I made a burner to see for myself after using it for work a few years ago. It’s a complete dumpster fire now, way worse than before. Bots and shitty animated gambling ads everywhere. Porn bots and scammers are trying to follow you every 2 seconds. Elon’s dipshit musings/ragebait are forced into your feed even when you block him. Any tweets you make get zero engagement. remaining accounts are either bots, racists, fascists, or creators and celebrities moaning and/or hemming and hawing about leaving all the time because muh ego. It’s not even worth witnessing the spectacle.

It’s also fucking straight up broken half the time. Mastodon is a breath of fresh air in comparison even pre-Elon. Wish more would use it.

The forced elon spam reeks of insecurity. I thought the whole reason behind being extremely rich was not giving a fuck about what the world thinks, yet here we are.

Can we take a step back for a second and think about the human condition that led someone to need a moral argument to get off X? What kind of pathetic, fucked up mind do you have where you can't just uninstall the app you have to appeal to morality.

Well there is a difference between disliking something and believing it is actively harmful. If you believe it is actively harmful for humans and society, it makes sense that you want to appeal to the society as a whole. Then you need to reason for why you feel the way you do. And there we go.

Facebook causes genocides in every 3ed world nation they push into.

social media is, as it is now, designed to push the worst. most racist, most murderous rhetoric because it garners more engagement.

I am not saying you are wrong, nor right, but I am wondering why you tell me/us that now, here.

because what makes Elon harmful for humanity is basically the same thing that makes Facebook harmful, massive uncontrolled influence on society

Well it depends on what you see as an acceptable cost of the benefits of social Media. You could easily find differences between platform, in their function and in their moderation. These differences might be valid reasons to give it a different evaluation.

But in case, you want to argue about whether or not Twitter is moral; and/or whether or not Facebook is as bad as Twitter, I am not interested in the discussion and my points weren't made in support of the position that Twitter is harmful but only in "defense" of people voicing their moral evaluation of social Media.

I don't think someone publishes an article to try to convince themselves to not use it. Of course it's to convince other people why to not use it.

This 100%! I barely used Twitter to begin with, but as soon as he went off the deep end, I completely deleted my account.

This whole twitter thing is like some lib version of a moral panic. Who cares, just get off it if you don't like the experience. But no, they all need to tell everyone how this makes them so morally pure.

Moral panics are over things that don't have negative real world consequences.

We've repeatedly seen what happens when disinformation and violent, extremist speech is given a place to flourish on social media. The crazies get even more radicalized, organized, and emboldened. They start taking actual action.

Qanon, the proud boys, unite the right, patriot front, January 6th -- where do you think those ideas gestated and grew to critical mass?

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That moral case was already there like a decade ago.

When he called the Philippine men, risking their lives to save children stuck and about to die in an underground cave, pedophiles because they refused to consider musk's retarded dive capsule idea... That was the moment that the moral case was there and it never left.

Musk is a scammer, he is a dumbass, he is incompetent, got fired for being incompetent, he just got really lucky winning the company shares jackpot when that company got bought out. That's all. He has a quality to make dumbass people listen to him and look up to him and make them somehow believe that he's smart but every word out of his mouth is either a lie or just really really painfully dumb.

I worked for Musk for longer than I care to admit, well before the world caught on to what an evil snake oil salesman he is and I endorse this post.

Let me just say after my time that the pedophile thing is probably nowhere near the worst thing that man has said or done to others he deems unworthy.

I had the idea of seeing if I could get an AI to draw a 10-point buck mounting him as a play on his name. No idea if that would be too far or not, but I would personally find it funny.

I joined Twitter fairly recently as Machine Learning Twitter is/was a thing, and I wanted to stay abreast of news from people like Andrej Karpathy, Chris Olah, Andrew Ng etc., especially since r/MachineLearning went down the shitter.

But I can't even - I log on and just instantly see ragebait posts from Daily Mail talking heads and bullshit.

Are there any better alternatives for this purpose?

Believe it or not, for tech deep cuts, Mastodon is better.

If you know of a better ML related instance than sigmoid.social let me know, but none of those influential figures I mentioned post there, and the discussion is pretty much non-existent.

If there are better alternatives entirely depends on how active those people are on Mastodon, Bluesky or even Threads. (Not sure on activity on Bluesky, as I haven't got an invite yet...)

I'm a PHP developer, many people (but not all) in the community crosspost on Twitter and Mastodon, so Mastodon is a good alternative for me personally.

There is a Mastodon instance sigmoid.social for this ostensible purpose, but it's pretty dead.

Lead by example. At least stop pretending that this news article/opinion piece belongs in a technology.

I love these websites posting, “It’s time to leave X” while also providing bait articles that just describe a Twitter conversation between two celebrities.

TIL we need convincing about that on Lemmy

Lemmy just seems like a big echo chamber of tech, Linux, and Political news. Maybe some memes sprinkled in, but little else.

I've never seen furry porn before joining Lemmy, half the stuff I have blocked is furry hentai

Oh yeah forgot there’s a lot of that too. I blocked all that months ago lol

That's just an issue with your instance. Most instances defederate from outright porn sites unless they're explicitly for made for NSFW.

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You say that like it's a bad thing. If you'd like more fascism or mindless idiocy no one's keeping you here

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The fediverse provides an alternative for people who care about using ethical products. Haven't tried threads/bluesky but they seem like more of the same. Unfortunately I don't think people care about the ethics of their micro-blogging platform; their biggest priority is having the largest soap box to shout from.

I'm not sure I'd call lemmy ethical considering how much genocide denial there is.

I think you missed the part where the person you are replying to is talking about the ethics of the platform itself, not the ethical viewpoint of the users using the platform nor the personal views of the developers.

Platforms don't have ethics. They're software, not people.

Platforms have the ethics of the people administrating them

And designing them. Anything coded has the biases of the people who made them baked in.

Software is shipped with a license. There are licenses that are more or less ethical.

Do I have bad news about twitter... At least no one profits from it here

Lemmy isn't one entity. It's several different websites. That would be like calling Linux unethical because some people use it for weapons research.... it's open source, so people can do whatever they want with it. Douglas Crockford famously added ""The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" to the license for JSON, but it was determined by various people to be unenforceable and not compatible with free software licensing.

If torturing primates isn't enough for u what is,????

paying for twitter

That says so much about u that animal torture is ok but don't they dare demand $8 from u.

Oh no im not saying that about myself. left a long time ago when he started rate limiting and funding right leaning mfs. I'm just trying to imagine wby people stay on a service like that. I kinda hope elon starts charging for twitter so when i see who actually pays for it, its gonna be much easier to cut them off.

I know a lot of people relying on it for sharing research papers and finding them. It's depressing to not have an alternative.

Maybe it's time to slowly transition to Fediverse?

It would be nice. The major issue is the network that people created there. It takes years to build it, and you won't have it back on the Fediverse.

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Does anyone here actually use it? I literally never made an account

I have an account that I use exclusively to DM companies for support. I found out that I can get help quicker and more easily than going through their website or call center hoops.

Downvote Musk spam.

The billionaire doesn’t need your help ensuring him and his businesses stay in the headlines every day. Don’t be a useful idiot.

Damn, this is actually quite compelling. I knew X/Twitter was bad, but didn't realize just how bad it has become. Thanks for posting.

I don't need a moral reason, I just think it's shit as it was before it rebranded

I still use X for work and have noticed an increase in the amount of hate speech and racist content. Its started appearing on my feed.

Problem is legacy Twitter still has huge scale so it's not so simple to switch to something else if you need a big audience. It will take time.

Deleted my X recently - not looking back.

This sounds like a euphemism for bottom surgery.

I just wish the artists would leave, but no other social media allows porn too.

Mastodon totally allows NSFW content. Maybe Threads doesn't, but why trade one deranged billionaire tech overlord for another?

Mastodon has some problems. It's slow, the "instances" concept is confusing, discoverability is poor, and the UI isn't as nice as Threads.

Still worth making the jump for the sake of community governance.

Twitter was destroyed by the governance problem. It proves how we can't ignore the governance structure of the places we invest our time anymore.

But yeah, I'm very disappointed how many people who hate Musk's changes to twitter -- even trans people -- are staying there.

Mastodon totally allows NSFW content.

Just search on the #NSFW hashtag, can't miss it.

Many artists have been hedging their bets the last few months, mirroring their content on Mastodon and BlueSky, so that when Twitter/X/Whatever it's called now goes under/is closed/goes subscription only/is locked behind the blockchain, they don't lose their fans, supporters, donators, and commissioners.

Yeah but Bluesky is invite only still.

Yeah, but that's the thing, most of them have not abandoned Twitter, they have just created accounts elsewhere. For now, at least on the case of nsfw artists, leaving Twitter is unfeasible.

They tend to mirror the content on other sites, so they can further grow their communities there too. Can you explain to me how Twitter remains integral when the content is available elsewhere too?

It's integral to them because the bulk of their audience, including crowdfunders and commissioners and other potential paying customers, remains there. It can be a difference between having a viable artistic career or needing another job. Xitter is in clear decline and worse by the day, but it still outnumbers the alternatives by hundreds of millions of active users.

Then the solution is for people who like art to accept invites and follow them on BlueSky.

Or to use Mastodon.

it still outnumbers the alternatives by hundreds of millions of active users.

Hundreds of millions of those active users don't care about art unless Elon's stealing it.

It's definitely better for them to move out but that's a whole process, if they want to try to bring even a fraction of their audience along.

Hundreds of millions of those active users don’t care about art unless Elon’s stealing it.

Eh, by that measure there's nowhere to go, because even here I see some people with a wild disregard towards art.

But really, there are people who care or those artists wouldn't ever have had a career to begin with.

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Lol, anyone who uses Twitter doesn't do it for morality. The mouth breathers are addicted to the drama and that's all there is to it

Ditched just over a year ago. My world is still as it should be. It's just a terrible app / organisation with gaming addiction

I never used Twitter in the first place because I had no idea what it was for.

Still don't.

Every single one of these things seemed to be "It's Facebook, but you can only do [gimmick]"

Better real time engagement. Think of it like your own personal news ticker or curated radio station with updates. I used it to get updates from sporting events when I didn't necessarily have access to a radio/tv and couldn't watch/ listen to a game, etc. because I was indisposed, at a function, movie, etc.I had a whole host of journalists, personalities, and people that would basically/ practically give me play by play and keep me informed of what was going on. It was actually truly great. Twitter isn't even close to what it once was.

Edit: wanted to add that you could think of Facebook as the modern rolodex at the time, still actually, while Twitter is/was more suitable for more real time engagement. Reddit sort of became the substitute for that up until they disastrously decided to shut down 3rd party apps. Now the site/subreddits are getting garbage content and it's a ghost town. Most subreddits I was on are barely getting anything orany posts anymore. Lemmy is definitely filling the void. I mean, at least it has usable apps.

It used to be great for gaming news updates. Back when the feed would just be who the user chose to follow. Sure, the big stuff would make it to Facebook eventually but I felt it was a better product for breaking news.

Do as you say please

What does that mean? The article says Twitter is "In this article" because it's about Twitter, and he notes that writing about Twitter is part of his job, but he deleted the app from his phone because he's revolted by the direction it's gone, and the article is basically a screed about how much he hates it now.

I finally left around the name change. Account is still there but I normally only check it when I'm texted a link, which rarely happens.

If your account is still there, that means it can still be hacked.

True. I might make a throwaway and close my real account. I did the same for Instagram links.

This is nothing new. This was one of the reasons I never even joined Twatter.

I'd really love to see what the twitter (or YouTube) feed is for a normal user. I don't doubt that the algorithms push extreme content, because that's what humans are naturally drawn to. After all, we want to look at car crashes aswell. However, I'm just really curious on why these people simply don't train the algorithm better.

Every now and then I get some right-wing(ish) video recommendation on YouTube and after I mark it as "not interested" it dissapears and it just goes back to recommending me stuff I'm actually interested in. Same with 1 minute long videos. I don't need to flag too many of them before it realizes it's not the content I don't like but the short lenght. In my personal experience twitter is way less agressive at pushing such content but even when it does the same solution works there too. "Not interested" and it stops showing up. Except for cat videos. Those never stop showing up no matter how often I mark it.

Huh? Have you been recently? There is no algorithm. You get gambling ads and bot bullshit no matter what subject you post about. It’s completely flatlined. The brain drain is palpable.

YouTube will at least find somewhat related videos based on what you view. Instagram/Meta will go so far as to slamming ads in your face trying to guess your mental illnesses with ad displays and getting spookily close simply by the memes and posts you gawk at by how long you hover over them. They completely embarrass Twitter in that area now.

And Twitter definitely wasn’t always this way. Creating a burner used to be a pain in the ass because it would usually somehow figure out who you were rapidly even on a fresh or sandboxed OS, and start slyly suggesting your old followers and similar. It was downright spooky at times. All of that is gone.

I've never had ads on twitter and the content it recommends me is the kind of content the people I'm following post aswell. Personally I notice no difference in my twitter experience now to what it was 4 years ago.

The ads are absolutely rampant on the burner I made. I don’t remember it ever being this bad. But my previous accounts were quite old and I rarely saw any at all back then.

You can use uBlock origin to block them

Right. I do but for this case I was using the app. Try that you’ll see what I mean about the insanity.

I believe you. Just pointing out that ads are optional, so that's not a reason for me to leave.

Haha imagine caring this much about a social media site.

Imagine also still using Facebook. Losers.

Haha Imagine caring enough to call people on a different social media site losers while being on a social media site.

Haha had this argument before. This isn't social media. I don't know you or care about you.

imagine thinking that’s what social media is…

It changes nothing. It's not social media. Convince me harder.

You're just flat out wrong here

Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of content, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks