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Comment by mgamache | Hacker News Reader

But no one was talking about "the left" or "the right" until you brought it up. The predictions from "the left" is something you feel adds to the conversation. Why? Why do you feel criticisms of the way Elon is running the company are associated to the "left," when plenty of neutral and non-partisan sources have called into question the way he is running the company?

"no one was talking about "the left" or "the right" until you brought it up", really?

https://nypost.com/2022/04/29/elon-musks-right-the-left-has-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/28/twitter-e...

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/31/musk-twitter-paul-p...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/congress-will-want...

The fact is some of the criticism of him is legit and I personally don't like the way Elon has promoted Tesla (bordering on fraud). But it's obvious the outrage is mostly selective. So Elon firing his well paid staff is worse than Apples hordes of child labor for years? Compare the reaction.

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-knowingly-used-child-l...

Nobody here was until you did. I would hope that HN would be above that stuff. We always complain that the MSM gets engineering work wrong. We value our own understanding of technical stuff better than the MSM's understanding. As such, I'd be curious how many were referencing laypeople or the MSM when they talk about Twitter's technical capabilities and risks here. I certainly would have assumed that we're all just talking about technical stuff as technical people, forget the laypeople and the MSM.

That's how it breaks though.

> I am not on the 'right', but it's clear the left and media have been using twitter as it's coordination and messaging infrastructure

You are not on the 'right' but calling out the 'left' while omitting the GOP (Trump, MTG, et al) and associates (Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, et al) from your assertion.

If those on the right have not used Twitter for coordination and messaging, then they are far behind the zeitgeist. If they are, then you are likely not aware of that, or if you are, intentionally omitted that fact to make a point.

The difference between Zuckerberg “wasting” $100B is that Meta is still a cash generating machine and has been since before it went public. Twitter has been a listless barely profitable shit show and now has to service more debt per year than it has cash flow.

> it's clear the left and media have been using twitter as it's coordination and messaging infrastructure

I don’t tweet/have an account and I browse only in private mode. Why do I see so many right-wing trolls? Kirk, Owens, Boebert, Sorbo, etc, a whole cadre of extremists intent on creating an angry mob, and countless other anti-social, lying, and hateful lunatics… they’re all there, they frequently appear in the “you might like” tweets after the linked tweet’s thread.

If you see twitter as “the left,” I suggest that may well be a result of the personalized engagement algorithm, because the untracked user is seeing a much broader range of tweets.

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