No heroes. (not heroes)
Dear Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O'Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of Intercept, Steve Herman of Voice of America, and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann, and Tony Webster, stop playing the role of heroes.
.
You are not Solzhenitsyn coming back home from the gulag. At best you have had a twitter account taken away from you: on the scale of terrible things, it comes right after a sandwich of yesterday's old avocado. You did not pass a terrible test, you were not tortured, you are not martyrs, and you are not heroes.
You are not heroes.
Theres no reason to see you as heroes. You done nothing special. You have not bothered a system and you have not made uncomfortable inquiries. You have only annoyed a spoiled rich child. I know numerous three-year-old children who overreact even worse, sometimes I enjoy making them overreact too, but I don't feel like a hero for that.
The fact that Elon Musk is mentally a three-year-old does not make you heroes or martyrs. Nor are you credible as extreme defenders of freedom of the press, let alone free speech.
For one thing, Twitter is behaving no differently than usual . It used to hunt people who were right-wingers , and it was a “safe space” for the woke culture, while today it is becoming a “safe space” for the right-wing culture by hunting people who come from the woke culture.
But changing compulsory things into forbidden things, and forbidden things into compulsory things, has not changed the amount of freedom. It only changed the name of the oppressed people. But there is no freedom today any less than there was before.
The difference is that now it's your turn to be kicked out
Until it was the right-wing people's turn to be kicked out, you were perfectly fine with it. “Democracy is us, freedom of the press is us, and only us.”
No, I don't believe you. I don't see you as heroes, I see you as opportunists who are trying to squeeze every penny you can, out of being kicked out. Maybe on twitter this would give you millions of new followers. But I don't think you will last long on the fediverse, for the simple reason that it is antiviral. Meaning: anti-narcissist.
About Fediverse, which several of you call “mastodon” (and we have to pretend that your journalism was about the Internet!) , I would like to know why , before today, you had never mentioned it.
Where are the articles that you guys wrote about it? Almost all instances, even those you use today instead of twitter, and certainly those of your followers, are run by volunteers, often funded by donations when they grow big.
Have you guys ever written about this? No. You got into it because you hope to get the applause , because you read Elon dislikes it , and because he will lead us (fediverse users since years) to sympathize with you. You are just weaponizing the fediverse for your use.
Honestly, you only seem to me to take advantage of the trends. You have never given anything to the Fediverse, you have never explained to the readers, many of you had never step a foot here, some of you had some unised account, and now you expect the Fediverse to become the army that fights on your side ?
You only look like the usual New York charlatans with an ego as big as New Jersey and a pathological narcissism that screams “cool before of important” every second. You think it's cool being here? Good for you. Do you think you are cool? Good.
But “cool” does not mean “important”, and you are nothing important to the fediverse.
I don't drink it, I don't drink that you want the Fediverse as a place of journalism.
You are looking for the same toxic “Safe Zone” which was once Twitter. And you hope to weaponize it for your interests: likely you hope to win some prize, or similar.
Now you complain that you do not have the “quote” function, only because it was the toxic way which you made journalism with. And no, it was not the function that was toxic, it was the way you used it to be toxic, and it was toxic because your mentality and your culture, the "Woke" culture, is toxic.
Besides, if you just used the fedeverse before, you would know that both Misskey and Akkoma can offer you the “quote” functionality. Apparently you, “internet journalists”, aren't aware of that. And I can see why: the first time you've read about “fediverse”, it was “mastodon”, and the only thing you know is that “Mastodon” annoys Elon “Kevin” Musk.