I say that in the most polite way possible: you Americans have a lot of internal issues you need to sort out, and quickly. You're polluting the rest of the world with your party politics.
I sometimes hear people conflating "the left" and "liberals" when... the left is here opposed to liberalism. Because liberalism means economic liberalism. And the local economic liberals are socially conservative. While the left is economically illiberal, and socially progressive. And our centrists are probably the closest thing we have to the US left, but since they are mostly allied with the right opposing them makes no sense.
But the actual, real reality is that 80%+ of people can't be measured in such a one-dimensional way. People have more nuance than that, and to get even a remotely accurate sense of where someone is politically requires a multipolar yardstick.
We see this from all sides from the liberals and the conservatives. What's ironic is both sides see the other side as doing it not them!
Originally from 1964 https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24964931
e.g Applied selectively to 2022: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2022/01/26/how-the-paranoi...
This has been a thing in the US since before we were the US. The south vs. north and urban vs. rural divide has deeply affected the entire fabric of the US down to the 3/5ths compromise in the Constitution to placate the southern states to ratify the Constitution in the first place.
Don't forget that time in the 1860's when literally half the country tried to leave as well. This is nothing new, it's just that the rest of the world can see it in real time nowadays (and much more of them speak English) when that was not possible previously unless you were a real international policy wonk.
I'd argue Musk himself has fallen prey to this partisan politics - it is really hard to support a large part of his tweets these days. He seems to have fallen into some strange mental quagmire with the failure of his twitter buyout, and his ego is not letting him accept any other reason for it than partisan sabotage.
But the way he is portrayed in the aggregate here and on reddit is even worse. He is either a genius beyond any criticism, or a complete fool, was always a fool and twitter is now exposing that.
We can't simply accept any middle ground, which is that he is likely a flawed human being who did some pretty amazing things once upon a time. If anything I hope we can steer him back to moonshot ideas, because he had a talent for it.
TBH it seems clear to me that he is a closeted libertarian who can't safely express his views in full without alienating huge segments of his mostly-red autoworker base or his mostly-blue techworker base.
It's a difficult tightrope to walk in the current ongoing partisan culture brawl.
However, it's important to note that there has been a genuine and very significant polarization of actual American politics over the past ~30-40 years—the seeds were planted with the Reagan presidency, and then Newt Gingrich in the early '90s started pushing the idea that political wins were more important than governing.
It's also important to note that this has been driven primarily by the rapid rush of the Republican Party to the right, from a conservative party with some fairly serious problems with racism, but a willingness to compromise and an understanding of governance, to a radical reactionary party refusing to censure or otherwise rein in the parts of it that are, in some cases, openly and explicitly embracing (christo-)fascism and Nazism, and advocating for outright violence against marginalized people.
I could not agree more. It's just hard to see how to move toward this goal.
If I pay for a social network, I want quality content and API access. Twitter wouldn't be the first platform I would pay for.
... if he didn't start by putting $12.5 billions of debt on the balance sheet after the buyout.
Which means that Twitter has to pay $1 billion of interest each year which it didn't have to do before that hostile takeover.
How many people would need to buy Twitter Blue to offset the interest alone? 125 million users which is about a third of its whole active user base.
Won't be first. There was app.net [1]. Gained traction at first and i had nice dialogues with good people, but died out pretty fast.
In a way, this is Elon buying a newspaper like rich people always did to influence politics, except that he is buying a modern version of a newspaper.
Musk bought twitter because it is and was an integral part in social media campaigns for the last few elections. Targeted ads on twitter can reach journalists and politicians, their timelines "for you" controlled by Elon's and they might not even understand that they are being nudged by the content shown in the app. Heck, just by unbanning Trump and allowing MFA Russia on the app, he is moving the Overton window a bit.
The proof is in the pudding as they say. How many million people now see Elon Musks personal twitter posts, that did not see them before he bought twitter?
First? No. There have been many attempts at this. The ActivityPub fediverse is the first with any prospect of competing with the VC-funded model. Thousands of servers, all but a few funded entirely by the millions of people who use them.
It's already self-sustaining. Twitter's new era is starting out billions in debt with its advertising base gone and flailing attempts to find some way to even cover the debt service.
Some probably do, but a whole lot don't. Musk was heavily criticized well before people were aware of his political views, for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with his political views.
That's supposedly what tech people root for, but because its Elon Musk, who eschews many of the shibboleths of the Left, people criticise Twitter as a proxy for his political views.