Twitter is threatening legal action against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that researches hate speech and content moderation on social media platforms.
The letter from Twitter’s lawyers alleges that CCDH’s research publications are intended to ‘harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away from the platform with incendiary claims.’
This is a pretty bold move from Twitter, especially considering that CCDH is a well-respected organization that has been doing this kind of research for years. And it’s especially ironic coming from Elon Musk, who has said that he’s a ‘free speech absolutist.’
But Musk has also shown that he’s sensitive to criticism, so it’s not surprising that he’s taking this kind of action against CCDH
Mastodon is a good pick to keep in the back pocket but it doesn’t have mass adoption yet, and all the others are art-dedicated websites. The advantage of Twitter was that it made it easy for their art to be shared widely but linked back to their account so that regular people just browsing would get to know their work and maybe follow them through it. Anyone regularly browsing those other websites are already art enthusiasts so that’s not so effective to expand their audience.
It won’t have adoption until it gets adopted. And the only way for that to happen is for people to adopt it of course. What probably needs to happen is for someone to write a simple app to either post to both at the same time or something that someone could run themselves or pay an inexpensive nominal fee for someone else to run for them to mirror their posts.
That was made harder because Twitter now charges for their API. Some people are trying to do both manually, but they can’t entirely move away since their livelihood depends on maintaining their audience.
We did these sort of things before apis. They will be possible when all apis are gone still.