Recent searches
Search options
Administered by:
I am, admittedly, middle aged, but I'm really a bit confused about the constant stream of loathing for people who still use Twitter when no one seems to mind anyone using Telegram. I've got a couple of theories, but they all seem inadequate:
- Scale: Twitter simply has (had?) more users than Telegram, so it seems like a bigger problem?
- Subversion: Twitter is more mainstream, so Nazis can more easily use it to recruit, which seems more dangerous than the overt fashy organizing that happens on Telegram?
- The bubble: It's just easier to overlook the massive Nazi presence on Telegram if you're not looking for it?
- Rapid change: Twitter has undergone a dramatic shift from an often disappointing, but sometimes useful platform to a total horror show, whereas Telegram has been a "Nazi bar" from the outset?
- Public figurehead: Twitter's obnoxious billionaire owner has a higher public profile in the US than Telegram's obnoxious billionaire owner?
- Tactics: Telegram doesn't have ads, so it's harder to see its revenue stream and therefore harder to imagine a strategy for pushing back?
- Hipster cred: Telegram retains a cool, edgy vibe, whereas Twitter has celebrity college professors, so it's just cooler to dunk on Twitter than on Telegram?
I think any of these could explain some of the discrepancy, but they're all, frankly, kind of pathetic. Telegram is a far better tool for actual Nazi organizing than Twitter is and you honestly would have to post some pretty horrific shit to get kicked off Telegram (Twitter is catching up in this respect, but they did kick Andrew Anglin off again a few months ago, so I suspect it's still not quite as tolerant of hatescreeds and overt violence as Telegram).
The article below is just about four years old, so it's not like I'm the first person to point all of this out. And the global reactionary presence on Telegram has grown substantially since then.
So what is it? Why do Twitter users get so much hate, while Telegram users seem to not be an issue? Can anyone explain it to a crusty weirdo who grew up in a house with a rotary phone?
#twitter #telegram #terrorgram
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/hope-not-hate-telegram-nazis
@ThatWeltschmerz it's primarily the "you don't see the nazi shit unless you look for it" thing
Telegram is more like WhatsApp than Twitter, and there is an awful lot of terrible stuff on there, but again, you have to actively go looking for it. I primarily use it to chat with my friends and subscribe to some news outlets, and it has a better UI than WhatsApp or Signal
But those are its competitors, not Twitter or Facebook
@julieofthespirits I get the "you don't see Nazi shit if you're not looking for it" part, at least theoretically.
But I'm not sure it's a question of who's competing with who. The complaint I see on here all the time is that just using Twitter helps keep up Twitter's ad revenue, so using it is equated with drinking at a Nazi bar. So at least for anyone who a) thinks people shouldn't use Twitter because of its Nazi problem, and b) is also aware of Telegram's huge Nazi presence (which is maybe fewer people than I think?), it's really a question of whether user traffic on Telegram also generates revenue, no? Aren't Twitter and Telegram more or less on the same plane in that regard? (Telegram's revenue stream seems to be a bit more complicated than Twitter's, but it still mostly comes down to numbers of eyeballs per month, as I understand it. I'm kind of a Luddite, though, so maybe I'm off here.)
The whole question assumes that we live in a universe where people always are (or should be) consistent in their decision-making, which is obviously not the case. I'm mostly just being cranky, I guess.
@ThatWeltschmerz @julieofthespirits I think the simple idea here is that while drinking in a nazi bar you're likely to meet a lot of nazis (twitter). Using telegram is like drinking in a bar possibly owned by someone who doesn't really mind nazis, but never seeing the owner nor any of the nazis. Or at least I imagine it's the case, because I barely use telegram. Meanwhile there's a lot of democratic organizing done on telegram. So for many the correct analogy might be "bringing your antifa friends to a bar that you never saw a nazi in, but there's a secret floor in that bar that lets nazis hang out, but it has a separate entrance so you will never meet each other".
@barnaba @ThatWeltschmerz yeah, it's just not comparable to twitter in a lot of ways. Twitter and Facebook algorithmically promote the far right, on Telegram they're there if you go looking for them. I run into far more nazis on the fediverse than on Telegram, incidentally, and yet here we are
@ThatWeltschmerz And there's a lot of nazis on mastodon too, because there's no built in mechanism to stop them (other than most instances not federating with them). The end result is similar - we are on a platform that has nazis, but get to never interact with them.