Home » Roger L. Simon says get off Twitter. Now.

Comments

Roger L. Simon says get off Twitter. Now. — 67 Comments

  1. I can’t get off Twitter, having never been on… I do wonder though why you would put a call to mass action behind a paywall?

  2. As to Twitter, its lying bearded CEO Jack Dorsey, and leaving it, cancelling your account, and Neo’s hesitancy, I refer you to Neo’s article just below, about Haffner, which says in small part, “It was not only the Kammergericht [high court for which Haffner worked at the time of the transition] that I had to bid adieu to in those days. “Adieu” had become the model of the day – a radical leave-taking of everything, without exception.”

    So does one want to be a Nazi, or not? There is only one moral choice, IMO, and that is get the hell off Twitter. Leave it to the Left, which has become evil. One cannot argue with them; you will be deleted just as Twitter blocked Trump for life.

    So say “Adieu”!

    Social media are not a force for good. I have never subscribed to any.

  3. I left Facebook after more than a decade of almost daily posting. I would engage leftist in debates , including local ones on local media accounts. But it was time for me to leave over their censoring. Went to MeWee, but it is a ghost town. Mike Lindale, the My Pillow guy, is trying to start up a new social media site called “ Frank”.

  4. I have never had a Twitter account, but I have seen many amateur videos during the riots on Twitter that countered the “ mostly peaceful” narrative, and for that I am thankful. Often , I would find those videos by following a FaceBook link to Twitter, which you can view without an account. You just cannot comment.

  5. Cicero,

    “get the hell off Twitter. Leave it to the Left, which has become evil.”

    You do not combat evil by protesting. You prepare for more ‘kinetic’ methods. As evil does not have a “okay, we have enough” limiter. Not saying that now’s the time but every day that time gets closer.

  6. I have similar sentiments, neo. I was never interested in Twitter, but I did self ban on Facebook. In one respect, I’m happy to have removed Facebook from my phone and its data. I won’t install their app. However, Facebook is still a good means to reach friends, family, and neighbors that use it (and are apolitical in most cases).

    The real value to me is Facebook caused me to care more about the news, because a few friends enjoyed remarking on the latest whatever. I cancelled news years ago. The remarks on Facebook gave the news more coverage than I cared to view. So now I just soft banned those friends. After all, the behavior behind the remarks is pretty much the same as Twitter, which I won’t abide.

    I prefer the long format provided by blogs for news commentary. The result is more thoughtful content.

  7. I never got on Twitter and recently perma-deleted FB from my life. I’ve even managed to talk a few family off of social media as well.

    I only see short term issues with Twitter becoming even more of a left-wing echo chamber than it already is. It’s already loaded with relatively sophisticated bot accounts, and its demise has been written on the wall for a couple of years now.

    With fewer Righties for the real humans and legions of bots to respond to, it will become the e-Bay of social media.

  8. I got off a year ago. Quit Twitter, Facebook Instagram, Youtube.

  9. It’s far too late in the day to be engaging with the Enemy and attempting rebuttal or persuasion.

    The only thing you want Twitter for is to keep up-to-date with intentions being telegraphed by the Enemy at national, state, and local levels. Have a bit of a DuckDuckGo around to learn how to do this without a Twitter account.

  10. Of course you hated Twitter. Your blog is a haven for thoughtful, reasoned discussion. Complete opposite of Twitter.

  11. I confess to checking Mollie Hemingway’s Twitter feed for news links, and for debunking of “fake news.” But I wonder how long they’ll let her keep doing it. I got along fine checking the Instapundit and other blogs before Twitter, and that still gives me a wide range of news and opinion. We don’t need Twitter or Facebook.

  12. Neo: ” I hated Twitter with such a passion from the start that there was no way I was going to engage with it.”

    Same here, and I never signed up for it. I wondered if my hatred was a little excessive, but as it has turned out I don’t think it was. It makes Facebook seem thoughtful and civilized, though I’ve had a number of quite unpleasant exchanges there about politics. I stay on Facebook for apolitical contact and news with a few relatives and old friends that I don’t see very often. I don’t know how typical this is, but almost everyone I’m Fb friends with, including the very intense people on both sides, seems to have backed off from talking politics. Burned out, maybe.

  13. The only “social media” I partake in is Blogs and commenting on them. Dropped FB years ago, never did Twitter. Not interested in them.

  14. I’ve never opened an account on any social media site; e-mail and phone calls work just fine for me in keeping in touch with family and close friends. I’ll admit, though, that I found Twitter particularly repellent when I first heard of it, not only because of its initial 140-character limit– which promised that users’ ids could fly freely without any ego or superego controls– but also because its very name as well as its reference to messages as “tweets” trivializes the entire activity. If you think about it, a number of English words beginning in tw- (twaddle, twee, twerp, twiddle, and twit) connote childishness, silliness, teasing, or taunting about insignificant matters. Dorsey is a birdbrain; ’nuff said.

  15. PA+Cat:

    You forgot one. All you oldies here should remember the airline stewardess joke punchline: “I’ll take your TWA Tea, please.”

  16. Zaphod: I did NOT forget that particular word; I simply chose not to post that particular crudity on Neo’s blog.

  17. Surely if it becomes 100% Lefty, they’ll just all end up cancelling one another, until there’s no one left.

    Never used it; my only acquaintance is with links from conservative sites. Never did get the point of it.

  18. Geoffrey B:
    “You do not combat evil by protesting.”
    Tell that to the Americans, black and white, who engaged in civil rights protests in the 1960s.

    It is hard for me as a non-techie to come up with a “more kinetic” solution to Twitter and its CEO than to simply boycott it.

    Mac:
    “Burned out”? No, intimidated against freedom of speech on both sides.

  19. Leaving Twitter is good, for all the reasons mentioned, but Neo is correct: simply leaving is self-censorship. The big Twitter conservatives, those with lots of followers and a prominent voice, have to go to the alternatives. That’s what it will take to kill Twitter.

  20. I left in January, I wont click on a twitter link or read anything posted there, it is toxic, it should go the way of myspace. I left twitter, instagram, snapchat and facebook.

  21. Never had any interest in Twitter. I was eventually going have a Facebook account and then I saw “The Social Network” movie. No thanks.

    A year ago or more I was fiddling with my web browser settings and decided to switch ON the “block third party cookies” setting. Why would any third party want to do this? I certainly don’t want it.

    The result is a bit of a pain. Lots of web sites throw up blocking windows when attempting entry, and those windows present a variety of options. I just reject most of those websites when the only option is to allow all third party cookies.

    Cutting to the chase: Apparently, when you go to any website that puts up content with a Facebook “Like” button you are installing a Facebook web plug-in. Even if you are not a Facebook user and never click on the Like button the plug-in will install third party cookies that track your web activity.

    Why? So that Facebook can prove to potential Facebook advertisers that certain ads that you viewed caused you to purchase a product. Ca-ching $$$.

    From Wikipedia:

    The like button is one of Facebook’s social plug-ins, in which the button can be placed on third-party websites. Its use centers around a form of an advertising network, in which it gathers information about which users visit what websites. This form of functionality, a sort of web beacon, has been significantly criticized for privacy. Privacy activist organizations have urged Facebook to stop its data collection through the plug-in, and governments have launched investigations into the activity for possible privacy law violations. Facebook has stated that it anonymizes the information after three months, and that the data collected is not shared or sold to third parties.

    So, inside of three months, Facebook operatives are looking at your name attached to your web activity.

    See this also. Ironically, I can’t fully view this one without allowing all third party cookies.

  22. I frequently use youtube to look for music. When I search for the music on other browsers, it usually goes to youtube. So….If I wanted to see some items from, say, The Kingston Trio, or Albinoni or…..Ballad of Rodger Young, or….. where would I go elsewhere?
    Does it make a difference when I always hit “skip ad”?
    If I wanted to show my grandkids something heroic, I could show them “manhattan boatlift”, but it’s only on youtube, afaik. Are there other sources?

    Thanking you in advance, I remain, etc.

  23. Richard A.,
    The Bing search engine will list websites, images, and videos that match your search. 90+% of those videos will pass through to Youtube probably.

    My uninformed guess is that clicking on “skip ad” must cost Youtube in lost funding. They probably rely on inattentiveness and sloth to boost ad dollars.

    Youtube is pretty amazing. It’s a pity that it is owned by the Alphabet borg.

  24. The 2020 documentary “The Social Dilemma” tells of how creators of the algorithm’s that Google and Facebook, etc, social media use to hijack your behaviour by changing your reward-system mind-behaviour patterns. Engineered psychometric marketing tools are the drivers of the social digital world.

    My Orwell, meet Mr Huxley (ie, not our poster here).

    They also explain how they accidentally hit upon these inventions driving social media exploitation today — and then ban it from their homes and from their kids because it’s too destructive and controlling.

    POWERFUL stuff, and revealing. Also, share it with fam and friends to reflect and reset and restart (face to face) one’s own social lives. Especially for our post-Covid time, that’s near.

    But conspicuously missing? Any comparison of our High Tech Oligarchs and China’s Social Credit synoptic on totalitarian state. Why not? Chinese monies funded Netflix which made this video.

    Evil is rampant today.

  25. Twitter declared me to be a bot after I’d been there for many years. The only way to get to my account was to allow Google to have free access to my computer system to do what ever they wanted. I refused to do that so I now have no way to deactivate my account or even see it to know what is there. Maybe Twitter will end up looking like Myspace did after it fell. An internet equivalent of the Chinese ghost cities, everything is there but the people.

  26. If Twitter wasn’t doing the censorship and things like that it had the possibility of being a new type of blogging system. Threads were in many ways the equal to blog posts. If you put up someone’s feed as a tab it was like going to their blog page. The app called Threadreader allowed you to save threads as PDFs and be notified when a new thread was posted by someone you read. I can still read threads at Threadreader but can’t of course interact or share them anymore.

  27. Never been on Twitter. Left Facebook many years ago after only about two months. I’m not even a fan of LinkedIn. Stay away from all of these socialist platforms.

  28. Related (by Glenn Greenwald) on the Giuliani outrage:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/corporate-news-outlets-again-confirm-same-false-story-while-many-refuse-correct-it

    Key graf (among many):
    “…Knowingly spreading lies…”

    (Equally relevant to the following “Sebastian Haffner” post.)

    + Bonus (from a Communist deplorable??!!)
    https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/education/deplorable-professor-creates-anti-indoctrination-mill-new-education

  29. Note for “geoff+b”, “Richard Aubrey”, etc.

    1. Get a Raspberry Pi computer ($35). You have to go through a number of gyrations to make it secure, but they get faster with practice.

    2. Use it on the website that wants to muck with you to accomplish what you wish. For example, see if geoff+b can “de-bot” himself. USE IT FOR NOTHING ELSE AND PROVIDE NO PERSONAL INFO.

    3. When your objective has been accomplished, scrub the computer. Reformat the SD (which gets rid of the computer name, user name, password, browser history, and cookies).

    4. You can generally re-use the parts. If you believe you have been observed by NSA level agencies, re-use the parts as printservers or something and never use a browser on them again.

    Mind you, the same objectives can be largely addressed using Virtual Machines — but the system that runs your VMs is going to cost a bit more than $35.

  30. I should also note that you can get the disposable computer cost down to $5 with the “Pi Zero”, but it’s trickier and better to start with a couple of iterations on the Pi4 (2G), which is the $35 model.

  31. I killed my Twitter account, and de-activated my FB account (keeping Messenger to keep in touch with a few friends and family while reducing the use of my presence by the Zuck to an absolute minimum).

    The last straw was seeing Zuckbook and the Twits inserting their opinion over top of my posts, as though they are the Arbiters of Truth.

    At that point, these platforms began to look like the Planet P scene in the cinematic Starship Troopers, where Lt. Rasczak realizes that the bugs are too numerous for his troopers to stop.

    I also killed my LinkedIn account, for its potential as a cancel-culture vector far outweighed its usefulness. Moved to MeWe and Parler, but I’m most active now as a commenter at blogs like this one, Insty, and Behind the Black.

    Perhaps such decentralization is the new paradigm …

  32. I have an account on twitter, but I literally never ever use it, and that was BEFORE they started all this censorship crap. I may have actually signed on a dozen times, lifetime total.

    There has rarely been a conversation which could be effective or valid when limited to 140 — or 280 — characters.

    “Twits” are the users, just as much the messages.

  33. Pingback:Tuesday Technical – Dark Brightness

  34. I am on Gab and I support Gab.

    I deleted Twitter and Facebook long ago, as a protest. It helped that the kids have moved past FB to other platforms and that my siblings are conservative.

    YouTube is hard. I use alternatives BitChute, Rumble, Odysee, etc as possible but YT has stuff that I can’t get elsewhere. For now I reluctantly use it but religiously “Skip Survey” and shut up ads as soon as the timer allows

  35. I was off of social media-totally. Then I just had to join wallstreetsilver on reddit. If you can precisely target a group on reddit you can have open discussions.

  36. Cthulu has some good advice. Raspberry Pis are very useful little devices, and it’s trivial and inexpensive to pop out the storage and mangle it if the desire to so ever hits you.

    Learning how to set one up is good education in some basic skills. Good user community.

    There is no such thing as foolproof online security and everyone makes mistakes. The thing is to improve through learning. At present I’d be more concerned about Big Tech putting heads together and de-platforming or messing with credit card and other payments acceptance than Big Fed. So making it harder for them to collate all your browsing and posting and form a profile of you would make sense –> You want to at least look into trying to stop cross site tracking of your activities.

    Not a bad place to start reading:

    https://www.eff.org/pages/tools

  37. I removed myself from Twitter over 2 years now and I’ve also told FAKEBOOK to go Fuck themselves and stopped posting there almost a year now! These SCUMBAG Companies don’t get my support or my money!

  38. A MUST TO GET RID OF FACEBOOK, YOUTUBE AND AMAZON, AS WELL!

    ??FREEDOM!??

  39. Twitter and Facebook have damaged civil discourse enormously.

    Dorsey and Zuckerberg are loathsome, freakish swine.

  40. Are conservatives saying “I got rid of Twitter, FB etc etc” our version of virtue signaling? Just a question that I know I’ll get burned here for.

    Never had twitter. I use FB daily for the main reason of keeping in touch with people I literally grew up with in the late 50s-60’s. We went through elementary, junior high and high school together, and are now spread across the country. There was a move by some to switch to MeWe but it really has not happened. If it did, I would drop FB quickly. I know, I’m “playing with the devil”, but keeping in touch with these people is important to me. I have also found it useful via a friend from grad school who has a number of lefty friends, to see what the latest “thinking” is on that side. So roast me now.

  41. A few computer security things to think about. These won’t be for everyone, but you should know they exist.

    Browser add-ons, such as UBlock Origin (careful, there’s more than one “ublock” and you don’t want one of them) or NoScript. Simple and easy, though not the most effective.

    A hosts file. Your device has one; yes it does. It’s a simple text file, and you can modify it to simply not connect to certain sites. Some devices may override this in their ROM, but you can do much with it.

    If you use Linux (see below) you also have a hosts.deny file which works a bit differently, but can block things earlier in the process. Windows doesn’t, and the BSDs work differently.

    Speaking of Linux, maybe consider it. It’s more labor-intensive, but the flip side is you have much more control. Many flavors, and there’s a learning curve, but if you want _control_ you can get as much as you are willing to learn/work for, including the rather extreme step of compiling it all from code.

    Use an old cheap computer (or a small dedicated device) as a router and run pfSense, OPNSense or another configurable router program. Again, there’s a learning curve, but you get _control_.

    The first two are the simplest, but all of them are some degree of time, effort and self-education. Not for everyone, but hey, there’s no free lunch.

  42. physicsguy wrote, “Are conservatives saying “I got rid of Twitter, FB etc etc” …”

    Actually, I think the “etc etc” is a problem. Ordinary people can’t do everything at once. They can do one thing at a time.

    So, “Bye, bye twitter. Forever.”

  43. There a lot of people, including conservatives/libertarians, who provide a link to a Twitter post which in turn goes to a blog post. Why on earth?…Just provide a direct link, and another link to Twitter if you must.

    But when links are provided as I described, you can only get to the blog post by hopping through Twitter. Weird.

  44. Thankfully I never joined Twitter. Neo you are correct (as usual) – lefties go on twitter to reinforce each others views. Twitter is pure evil and there are few things so ugly in this world than a Left-wing Twitter mob. I did join Gab a couple of years back but became disgusted with the anti-Semitic Alt-Right types I found there and deleted my account. How many careers and lives have been ruined by Twitter?

  45. I had Twitter from August 2020 to January 2021. Only to follow conservative commenters like Shipwrecked Crew whose postings on Red State grew less. Then the banning of Trump caused me to delete it.

    Facebook I still have but I don’t post. Just read family news. My wife keeps me updated on other matters.

    I still use You Tube because of it’s library and many bloggers like “The Gaggle” haven’t transitioned to Locals yet. Those who have like Viva Frei and Barnes and People’s Pundit I go to locals. It’s music library is unmatched particularly the older songs and artists.

    In the political activist groups I belong to I am finding we are going to need a presence on these platforms to do outreach and connect with others. Also it is a way to present countervailing information to those who are still persuadable or disengaged. Ditto Next Door. So many local activist groups exist.

    So we haven’t quit the battlespace but we plan to use them as a tool to influence.

  46. “There is a desire to put out an alternative message from the one advanced by the left and to have it be heard by those who are not already in the conservative camp. If Twitter becomes an unopposed leftist echo chamber, is that better or worse? To me it seems it might be worse.”

    When you have no guarantee on a channel that your “alternative message” will be delivered, whether through censorship or shadow banning, then there’s little incentive to keep putting the message out on such a channel.

  47. I got off Twitter when they suspended President Trump permanently. I only joined Twitter because of him & got out because of him! Freedom of Speech is what will keep this country going strong. If you lose that, you will stand to lose everything! #GetOffTwitter

  48. I cancelled Twitter months ago. It’s refreshing to hear that others are too.

  49. I’ve never much cared for it or understood the point of it. I do check the state department of transportation site, for traffic conditions. That’s it. Any Republican state government should make it a point in re this sort of service to have parallel tweets on Gab and Parler at the very least, or to move all such activity to Gab or Parler.

    Twitter is the enemy of justice and good order.

  50. I’ve never been a FB or Twitter member.

    Was on pintrest for a while but what it THOUGHT I was interested was wrong so I deleted my account.

    Pretty much the only ‘Social Media’ I use are blogs like Neo’s.

    Being a lifelong computer nerd I think cthulhu’s suggestion of RaspberryPi and linux is very cool. Just be patient as RPi’s can seem glacially slow compare to what you are likely using now.

  51. I got a Twitter account in 2007, when it was still new and intriguing. I quickly found it to be vapid and unbelievably irritating. I would ‘tweet’ at most a couple times a year and finally deleted my account in 2013. My tweets often were political; just mainstream conservative commentary…which means I would probably be banned now.

  52. If you use an iPhone or iPad, the latest iOS, version 14.5, includes a new feature on third-party trackers like Facebook and Google …

    https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/05/04/insanity-wrap-199-facebooks-most-laughable-lie-ever-n1444411

    You’re automatically opted out from allowing apps to see what you do in other apps. You’re even automatically opted out from apps being allowed to merely ask permission to use cross-app tracking. …

    Scroll down at the link for more detail.

    I just checked my phone and see that 14.5 is available for me to install.

  53. I have never had a Facebook or Twitter account, but have been made aware that Facebook can track you even if you have no Facebook account.

  54. Twitter makes you stupid. It may do so in a few tweets or it may take years of daily tweets, but it always makes you stupid. One stupid tweet will show the entire Internet that you’re stupid. And even if you delete it, it’s out there forever.

    If you’re not too stupid yet, get off Twitter while you can.

  55. “There a lot of people, including conservatives/libertarians, who provide a link to a Twitter post which in turn goes to a blog post. Why on earth?…Just provide a direct link, and another link to Twitter if you must.” – david foster

    Amen to that.
    I understand why Twitchy does it, because twitting Tweets is their raison d’etre, but I think other posters are just lazy. Ditto those who quote someone quoting another post, instead of going directly to the source.

    Runner-up, or possibly tie, for irritation: posts that quote the substance of a Tweet, and then immediately embed the Tweet itself. Pick ONE or it’s just sloth and padding.

  56. “Runner-up, or possibly tie, for irritation: posts that quote the substance of a Tweet, and then immediately embed the Tweet itself. Pick ONE or it’s just sloth and padding.”

    I believe this is just ensuring those who have twitter blocked can still see the substance of the tweet, with the link being proof of such. My company blocks most social media with their firewall, for instance.

  57. We have a Facebook account to keep track of our relatives and old co-workers. One thing you notice about Facebook is that normal people use Facebook to post pictures of their grandchildren. Liberals use Facebook to post political rants.

  58. I never started with Twitter, even before it was clear how partisan and divisive it would be. I could never fathom why anyone wanted to engage in what seems to be intentionally designed to encourage users to throw slogans, mottoes and insults at one another while actively preventing any thoughtful analysis or real discussion or understanding. Facebook is a tougher problem, as I value the connections it provides with my very large extended family, scattered around the country and the world, and with likewise scattered old friends with whom I wouldn’t otherwise have reconnected. There’s no way to replace that at MeWe or whatever, as none of them will be going there anytime soon.

    No one I’m connected with posts much about politics, fortunately, and I rarely post there myself — I just read and comment from time to time. Still, I understand that simply by keeping my account, I’m giving up privacy and giving Big Tech myself as another product to sell. I do read Facebook only on Firefox, which has a “container” feature that supposedly limits Facebook’s ability to track people around the web. It does seem to work, at least to some extent — since I installed it, I’ve definitely noticed much less of the creepy site-to-site overlap of ads that appear to read your mind.

    I’ve also been trying to limit Google’s reach by using DuckDuckGo, and Firefox rather than Chrome whenever possible (though I find that not all sites play well with Firefox, and it hangs up sometimes.) Ironically, I uninstalled Firefox some years back over the Brendan Eich thing, but now it seems like the lesser of two evils. It’s hard to keep up!

  59. Brave is Eich’s new browser.
    Never fire the guy who wrote your code and started your company.

    (Wikipedia)
    “…creator of the JavaScript programming language. He co-founded the Mozilla project,[3] the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation,”
    which owns the Firefox browser, “In January 2016, the [new] company released developer versions of its open-source, Chromium-based Brave web browser,which blocks ads and trackers”

    Sorry to see he is still using Google’s Chromium, but that’s the way the ball rolls when a company essentially owns the universe.
    However, it is open-source, and free. “There is no such thing as an official Chromium build from Google. All browsers released with the Chromium name and logo are built by other parties.”

  60. @Aesop:

    Chromium (de-googleified Chrome) with the extra security focus of Brave devs is about as good as things can get right now.

    Chrome/Chromium and hence Brave are notorious Memory Hogs, but most of the loud complaints come from people with older PCs or who think they have a God-given Right to have a million browser tabs open for months on end.

    16 or 32GB RAM if you have a Windows machine and life is peachy. Wouldn’t get out of bed for less… Windows won’t either 😛

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>