Does Musk gain anything for making Mastodon such a good alternative?
I think Twitter and Reddit going down the drains is an op at this point. The state department heavily used Twitter in their work. The NSA gathered a ton of data from both of them. They manipulated public discourse in real time when they needed to.
Musk is someone they have control over due to his ties to the MIC. He doesn’t just do things that would disrupt state propaganda operations without approvals.
Two major social networks effectively destroying their ability to get information produced by the community into the wider public through search indexing? This isn’t a coincidence.
I don’t see what the objective would be though. If they remained the way they were, banning and co-opting any anti-capitalist community I think they’d have a much better impact for US interests. By airfrying the frog rather than just boiling it, they’re just scaring away even the most “normie” people and organisations to harder-to-control alternatives. Just look at beehaw and how many libs went there from reddit. Even the short-term benefits of such strategy (like making smaller international organisations hidden from the public), in the long term it’s making those same people consider at least keeping a mastodon/lemmy branch. That is unless the Fediverse is somehow owned by the feds. Would be funny ngl.
I don’t think their trying to control normies who use these platforms. I think their trying to disrupt information flow from power users/influencers to normies by destroying the search indexing. If I search for stuff about the war and I get results from Twitter and Reddit countering the narrative, that has broad social implications.
That is to say, it’s a mass media disruption, not a community disruption.
Fair point. I still think that their results would be very mixed if that’s the case, considering how suddenly alternatives are getting established.
I just don’t think alternatives are able to effect mass media narratives the same way. Think of it this way.
First, narrative control was mass media control. Then new media showed up. New media control started by flooding it with state activity. That didn’t go far enough. So next we get search algorithm changes, staring with Google’s individual search bubbles which allows for R&D of advanced “forum sliding” techniques being ported into “the algorithm”. Those algorithm techniques then get ported to every major social media platform and everyone is confused as to why every single platform slides every single user into right wing extremism.
Reddit and Twitter remain the exceptions because forum sliding works for the posts but doesn’t work well enough for the comments. Comments become the place for counter narratives and they are starting to show up in search bubbles because the article triggers state narrative but the commentary produces counter-narrative.
Yes, there are alternatives, but they don’t have search juice yet and likely won’t for a specific amount of time - say 3 months, say 9 months, whatever.
If this is state coordinated action, as I theorize, then the window to searchability is likely understood roughly or even potentially influenced since search is state influenced. This means that within this window we should expect the state to be taking actions that require counter narratives to die. We see this with Ukraine now. I dread the possibility that the social media disruption is a harbinger and not a reaction.
