Interesting What's Happened to My Twitter Following
Is this the Musk effect or has something else occurred?
Everyone has heard of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. It seems to be proceeding. We’ll see what the federal government thinks and does. There seems to be some rumblings, but the process seems to be continuing unabated.
The curious thing about my Twitter account is it has exploded since Musk announced his bid. About a week or so ago, I was at 33.1K followers. In the last week that has blown up to 41.2K. It seems to be growing at around 100 followers per day, even when I don’t post anything. I’ve been hearing rumors that a number of previously banned or heavily censored conservative Twitter users have had their feeds “dialed down” or censored. Did the old Twitter have me dialed down, because of my conservative leanings? It really seems suspicious and strange to me.
From my view, I basically hate Twitter’s old platform. Had I written this on Twitter instead of Substack, I long ago would have had the red colored warning letters hitting my screen, telling me that I now had to end the post, then go back and cut out as many words as I could and still attempt to be coherent.
In the interest of offering some modest suggestions, perhaps someone could pass these along to Elon?
edit button - Sometimes I get going fast and misspell something. Then, I get to look at my mistake for days as followers like it, retweet it, ask me a questions about it, etc. Embarrassing!
Get rid of the imposters. I’m up to 6 or 7 at least. I get really tired of notifying Twitter, providing the same Arizona license I did the previous 6 times, explaining that the imposter is trying to scam my friends. Total waste of time and doesn’t put Twitter in a very good light.
Expand the 280 characters. Facebook doesn’t seem to limit me. Parler has 1000. I don’t even know if Substack has a limit. Server farms these days seem to have infinite capacity. It’s kind hard to make an intelligent statement including facts, charts, pictures, etc. and do it in 280 characters. That makes Twitter a place where short statements of opinions, many times not really very well thought out, reside in quantity.
Knock out users only if a law is broken and the user is charged and/or convicted. Users have the built in ability to scroll past whatever they don’t want to read. They also can mute or block other users that are being abusive or posting things they don’t wish to see. Current libel laws cover lying about someone and harming reputations. I’m totally okay with users posting an opinion on trading, or really anything, that I totally disagree with. Debate is where discoveries can be made. Nobody, including me has all the answers. Healthy discussion is useful to mankind progressing.
Reinstate everybody that has been banned and start over with the moderating. Make the moderating algorithms totally transparent and public, allow everyone to debate them.
That’s it for today. A diversion from the markets and still stopping out of etfs, moving the stops on my hedge down, trading my 10 strategies and enjoying the ride.
Very well said. All of it. Thank you.
Great suggestions Tom. I expect Elon Musk will find, and likely expose, a tremendous amount of manipulation by Twitter in favor of the left. Glad to see your account is growing!