Elon Musk's X Is Completely Useless Now, and the GOP Is Freaking Out Over RFK, Jr.

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | October 10, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | October 10, 2023 |

I’m not going to talk about the intricacies of the Israeli-Gaza crisis. It’s what my wife does professionally. I’m prone to sticking my foot in my mouth, and I cannot do that on this topic. My family is Jewish, and we have friends in Israel, and we have strong feelings. But there are also differences of opinion among writers I respect on this site and elsewhere, although I think we can all agree that terrorism is never justified.

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That said, Joshua Malina is a good follow on X right now, although he may be the only remaining good follow on the former Twitter. X had already lost most of its utility, and with the Israeli-Gaza crisis, it’s completely lost its usefulness for real-time news. It is flooded with disinformation and antisemitism, and Elon Musk himself is promoting sources of information on the conflict from known bigots.

Everything that Musk has done to ruin Twitter — removing verification, making it available to anyone for $8, allowing trolls and bigots to return to the site, and firing the trust and safety folks — all came to a head over the weekend. “For many reasons, this is the hardest time I’ve ever had covering a crisis on here,” a researcher cited by Wired posted to X. “Credible links are now photos. On the ground news outlets struggle to reach audiences without an expensive blue check mark. Xenophobic goons are boosted by the platform’s CEO. End times, folks.”

“It’s now almost impossible to tell what’s a fact, what’s a rumor, what’s a conspiracy theory, and what’s trolling,” conspiracy theory researcher Mike Rothschild told Bloomberg.

“Out of the top 10 posts sharing the video purporting to show Gaza on fire (the video is from a celebration of a football championship in Algeria) 7 have no community note attached and 6 are from verified accounts,” according to Zoe Schiffer over on Platformer.

X is not just unusable. It’s dangerous. It’s also completely irrelevant now. Interestingly, as a breaking news source, Threads has become viable almost overnight, as all the major journalists have moved over there and are lobbying Meta to provide us with the tools necessary to make it a better news source. It helped that CNN put up a thread so that users could easily find journalists to follow (follow us while you’re there)!

Related: Some “mainstream” media articles are also full of unsourced disinformation.

In other news: The Trump folks and the Republican party in general are shitting bricks about Robert F. Kennedy’s decision to run as an independent, as internal polling is showing that RFK would draw more votes away from Trump than Biden. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to matter in what could be a close election. (I am still skeptical about the possibility that this will actually be a close election).

“We’re gonna be dropping napalm after napalm on his head reminding the public of his very liberal views, dating back to 2012,” a Trump person told Semafor. “We have a lot of stuff on him.”

Good luck. If there’s anything we’ve learned about conspiracy theorists over the years, it’s that they don’t give a damn about oppo research. In fact, it sometimes hardens their beliefs. And in many ways, RFK, Jr. is to the right of even Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, according to Business Insider, the Republicans have released a memory offering 23 reasons why they GOP voters should not vote for RFK, which interestingly includes that he’s an election denier. It’s true. He is! He should fit right in with the GOP.