If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
He's also using his fame and fortune to much more directly fund and promote political change in places like the UK. It goes beyond this one service, but moving away from this service weakens his position more broadly as well.
That's always been the case with Twitter - Dorsey was just as bad, but just with a different set of political views. (Views that, I presume, the EFF is aligned with).
It was real, and even as a kid I knew it was wrong.
So I feared for Sambo when he encountered the tigers. I was elated when he eluded them by first racing around the tree and then climbing it. I was mystified how tigers running round and round a tree could turn to butter (but set that aside so I could continue the story and reduce my fearful suspense). I was relieved to see that Sambo was safe. I identified with Sambo (although I am neither black or brown).
Hoorah for the fantastic tales from many lands that filled my childhood and those of my brothers and sisters with wonder!
I am still a child when I read fairy tales and fables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Little_Black_Samb...
Even more so if it's not just a personal decision to get a bite to eat, but one taken by a lobbying organization about where to host events promoting speech rights, and the new owner is co-opting their language of speech rights to justify his policy of putting Conferedate flags behind the bar (whilst actually barring more people he doesn't like than the old owner as well as scaring off most of the people who supported the organizations mission and pasting KKK event ads flyers over the top of theirs). At some point continuing to hang out there and host events for ever diminishing numbers of people who mostly seem to reinterpret everything you say as screeds against 'woke' ceases to be a "politically neutral, pro-free speech" stance.
We get there and it's all white people, and there was an older gentleman singing a country song. We take a seat at an empty booth underneath a confederate flag and a sign about the 2A. We joke about how rednecky the vibes were.
For context, my wife is Chinese and wears a hijab, my sister and I are southeast Asian, and my sister's boyfriend is Indian. Couldn't have a more non-white group if you'd asked for one.
Despite feeling deeply out of place, but not unsafe, we got some songs in, ate some meh bar food, and had an all-around good time. My sister's boyfriend chatted with some people in the smoke room. Everyone was friendly.
A lot of people really don't care about the politics of the establishments they visit. They just want to have a good time.
Are you that user that replaces all your comments with periods once enough people flag you?
"If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
Yes? If you go to the southern part of the United States, there are many restaurants with Confederate memorabilia and Confederate flags on the back of truck windows.
Some trucks even have hairy testicles hanging off the hitch haha!
I find the idea of venerating an ideology that held that it was ok to hold human beings in bondage from the moment of their birth to their death to be abhorrent.
And that icludes not using x. And it includes criticising, mocking or talking about what x owner does.
And like I pointed out, these are not just any old "political views". It's extremist stuff that in the past would have gotten you ostracized. I'm old enough to remember Trent Lott losing his Senate leadership position, for instance.
Also, because of "network effects", simply providing content to Twitter makes the site more valuable.
This helped keep a neutral or at worst ambivalent image of these owners in the minds of the larger public and thus for the most part didn't factor into purchase decisions.
It's now easier than ever to see the true character of a business owner and so it's only natural that customers have begun to factor in this information in purchase/usage decisions.
I don’t expect them to provide a platform for people who make it a point to hate others and advocate for removal of their / my rights and so on.
how is that not "producing content"?
For example, I do not feel comfortable using the same platform as people that post child sexual abuse material. X's Grok is infamous for generating such content on demand. I opt to use platforms that do not have this as a first-class feature. X has selected against my participation and for the participations of people who hold a contrary opinion to me. Even if Grok stops producing CSAM, that selection bias will persist.
Regarding your later edit:
> PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.
It really shouldn't surprise you that if you express something that's a bit of a hot take that you'll get a reaction to it. You shouldn't draw any more of an inference from it then "people are passionate about this and some of them disagree with me." Whether people do so amicably or not has at least as much to do with the problems with the Internet as a means of communication as the issue itself.
Regardless, this status quo you refer to was mostly imagined. How much pressure people exert to boycott some platform or another waxes and wanes, because the underlying disagreements wax and wane in relevance. That doesn't really make it a new thing, just a new phase in the same unfolding history.
That's why you refer to the press barons in the era of yellow journalism - the past is not an undifferentiated mass where everyone held some set of values that have fallen from favor. To the people who were alive at the time, things were contentious and in flux and the future was uncertain.
We have a tendency to flatten the past and imagine it as a straightforward narrative where we necessarily arrived at where we are today because of the inevitable interaction of historical forces, and similarly to flatten the people who lived at the time as being caricatures who reliably held a certain set of values. But they disagreed with each other, viewed the future as up for grabs like we do, and they changed their minds as history unfolded.
People aren't raking through Musk's obscure remarks to find something objectionable. Musk has been force-spraying his political opinions onto everyone for quite a while, and people have gotten tired of it.
I didn't leave X when Musk acquired Twitter, and I'm not scandalised by people's political positions, even when they're extreme. But a position and behaviour are two very different things (e.g. being a racist vs making a Nazi salute on live television). I left when the atmosphere amplified by the site became... not for me. I won't go into a pub full of football hooligans not because I disagree with their club affiliation but because their conduct creates an atmosphere that's not for me.
As for newspapers (even ignoring those with political party affiliations, something that was common in newspapers' heyday), most of them preserved some kind of civil decorum, and those that didn't weren't read by those who wanted some decorum. How civilised some environment is is not a matter of political position.
Also, there were always some people of influence that held extreme views. But such people behaving in an uncivilised manner in public was less common (and certainly less accepted).
I mean, there are a lot of conservatives I respect including Mitt Romney, Robert Nisbett, George Will, and Thomas Sowell. Then there are the jerks like William F. Buckley and David Horowitz. [1]
Then there is Musk who's below even them -- but I am not particularly offended by Hobby Lobby or Chicken-Fil-A.
[1] if you want to know the criteria I use take a look at this book https://www.amazon.com/Watch-Right-Conservative-Intellectual...
Notwithstanding the above, given how powerful network effects are in social media, I think boycotting platforms operated by people like Musk (I struggle to find the words to fully encompass how repulsive he has become) is arguably one of the more effective forms of protest available to people, and I encourage them to exercise it.
That ... does not hold at all. You wouldn't buy or subscribe to an openly Nazi paper unless you are a full blown white supremacist.
(And most of the other top-engaged accounts are MAGA accounts: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...)
If you were not aware of it, it is not because it wasn't happening. Historically, excepting media companies, left leaning companies have always been outspoken about this while right leaning ones believed in the idea of focusing on business and avoiding overt political messaging.
So companies like Exxon were not broadcasting their views but were still lobbying government directly to change the laws in a way that benefit them (see deregulation).
Elon Musk will always be just a Giant, Nazi-aligned, Dildo on my scorecard.
Obviously that doesn't matter to anyone. But it matters to me.
Since 18th century at the very least; see: anti-slavery sugar boycott[1].
That's if you absolutely ignore the parent's point that political views are things like specifics of policy, not whether some people should be considered subhuman.
>Seems to me that this is what has changed.
It seems so because you don't know history, and didn't do a one-minute Google search for history of successful boycotts.
The article I'm linking is in the "bite-sized" category.
Enjoy.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z3rj7ty/revision/7
And I wouldn't call white nationalism a "political" view, like it's some ordinary kind of opinion. That's sanewashing something disgusting and disgraceful. That type needs to get shoved back under the rock they crawled out from.