In my continued non-use of Twitter, I’m glad to have time I’m not just dumping into doomscrolling. I’ve done things like make and modify models and write things up and play games and also my actual job whenever there’s something I can do there. However, on the side of Mr. Rich Rodent buying the whole Twitter, there’s apparently plans to un-ban certain bad actors, or at least one, who have pretty much encouraged and committed crimes, and this is said to be in the name of free speech.
I offer a challenge to step this up even further, to really be in the name of free speech. Why not un-ban every single account that has ever been banned on Twitter? Every single one. Even the spam accounts. Even the ones that were posting highly illegal content to whatever extent is possible on Twitter. Especially the accounts that were banned on some automated moderation technicality and actually did nothing wrong because trying to run an algorithm to ban people is something that never works right anyway. I don’t know how they handle recycling usernames if they’re even doing that for banned accounts, but if someone took that username in the meantime, give it back to whoever had it prior in terms of seniority and tack on a random number on the later users. That oughta give things a kick.
After all the internet prisoners are let loose back into some vague definition of society, just get rid of banning entirely. No temporary bans, no permanent, no “shadowbanning” whatever the hell that is. Then let’s just see how long this maximized chaos holds until promises start being broken and the bans start happening again. If they really want to get spicy with it, also disable and undo all blocks and mutes. If they’re going to offer unfiltered free speech from any dork with the ability to post, they should mean it. It’s going to be a hellsite beyond hellsites.
For anyone still brave enough to stay there, despite whatever degree they go through with the above plan to come the closest to breaking the internet yet, which I doubt they’ll get very far into anyway past maybe unbanning up to ten favorite rich jerks at most, I offer this suggestion: Find the weirdest and most bizarre yet legal porn of whatever format that can be searched up in the depths of SafeSearch Off and post tons of it, and often. Especially if that someone is really just staying there out of spite. If someone on there already produces this sort of content, great, keep doing that. And I must insist on the legal part. The point isn’t to get arrested, just to see how far the site can be pushed before they defy the apparent “free speech” promise. And they have age gates for explicit content for legal reasons anyway, I think. Still, whoever’s up for this crazy sort of weird-ass maybe-protest-type thing, I want to see boundaries pushed. I want to learn about fetishes I had no chance of ever considering the existence of prior. And I know about a lot of those. I find that whole part of psychology interesting so I’ve done some research.
I come from a site hosted somewhere that for at least as far as I can tell has a relatively open policy, though I haven’t really dug into the history of it. I’m really just here for the generous free hosting, and the option of pretty generous cheap hosting if I went that route. But I’m pretty sure there’s conspiracy theorists and people that tend to get requests to be banned on usual white-and-blue social media pages lurking about on this host, though most examples I’ve seen on here are just folks who wanted a webpage for whatever reason. If you put that sort of finding into perspective by contrasting with the power that certain types have in social media, the idea of having a website where someone can do a lot of things other than post little things under 300-ish characters and not be under advertiser-led scrutiny directly among other things, I’d think, would seem more appealing, especially to those not having the massive follower count to boss around, just to have more control over things. Sure did to me. Having the drive to put together a site, even if using a site builder to avoid having to learn all the ins and outs of HTML at the very least, deserves some respect in this social media-driven age, even if someone uses that ability for more evil purposes.
Creative outlets are nice. It just takes a little more effort to have a website made than for a social media page, and companies hire people specifically to maintain social media pages. They might do that for websites or just source those out, depending. I feel like on a typical snack wrapper they’re pushing social media presence more than an actual website for the product. “Brand engagement” they call it, I think.