Canadian Left flees from X to hide from all the free speech
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
183.55339
Summary
In the wake of the election results, the left has decided to leave social media platforms like Twitter and other platforms that allow them to freely express their views. I discuss why this is a good thing, and how it will affect the future of social media.
Transcript
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At least to me, this is one of the funniest stories of the week.
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So in the aftermath of Kamala Harris losing the U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump,
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the left, both in the U.S. as well as around the world,
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has just started declaring that they're leaving Twitter X.
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There's too much free speech around here, so we're leaving.
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Guys, do you realize that you are already becoming culturally irrelevant?
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I invite you to leave to make sure that nobody cares what you guys have to say.
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Remember when the right started creating alternative social media platforms?
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That was done almost out of an involuntary need.
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You had a lot of conservatives, a lot of people on the right who were being kicked off of Twitter
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back when there was a lot of censorship on it, and because they weren't allowed back on,
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you couldn't just make a new account, you'd just get auto-banned if they found out it is you.
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You had to go join places like Parler and other outlets, and now what we have is the left,
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because there is the ability to speak freely, moving over to BlueSky, a platform with nobody using it.
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Yes, apparently, according to their Wikipedia page, they have 15.2 million registered users.
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Cool. I'm pretty sure Parler had way more than that at one point.
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It didn't matter, because nobody really wanted to be there.
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The thing with social media is it lacks any value if you can't, in theory, connect with everyone on it.
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That's why X works. That's why Facebook works. That's why other social media sites work.
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If you want to have a micro social media network, that's called a forum.
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You can go and join your Antifa of Portland forum and talk to the people around your local area,
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but you're not going to be able to start a new social media company out of nothing,
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no necessity for it to exist, and be able to turn it into an effective cultural tool.
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There are so many people, and I'm mostly talking about Canada here, so if you're an American, welcome,
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but I'm talking about Canadian lefty activists online, as well as politicians who are just self-selecting themselves
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They are just going to basically censor themselves, start talking only to a tiny echo chamber,
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and they are going to continue to wonder why they are losing the use.
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Maybe it's because you refuse to connect with them unless it's on your exact terms.
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They don't want speech to happen unless it happens on their terms.
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X is way more free speech than Twitter used to be before Elon Musk bought it.
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There are some very awful people on X who get to speak freely, and guess what?
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There's actually a lot of utility in that, because you can't hide your views
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when no one's going to drop the ban hammer on you for saying it.
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Obviously, you'll get banned for harassing someone hour after hour,
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or if you're inciting violence directly, obviously,
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but it's actually exposed a lot of people for being really nasty,
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because they can't make the excuse, well, I'm not going to say what I think because I'll get banned.
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And it has exposed so many grifters and so many terrible people like Andrew Tate
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from them just being given a megaphone to expose themselves.
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but there's fewer people who respect them than ever as well.
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So let's just go down this little path of looking at some of these people
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who genuinely actually had social media traction,
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Here's this Callum guy that I highlighted on the show a few days ago,
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He's sort of staying on, but he started this Blue Sky account,
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so he can go and talk to maybe the 25 other people who are in Calgary
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It's just going to mean that he's splitting his time between Twitter,
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so I assume that's indicating he's going to stop using this platform so much.
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His only traction was on X, to give him some credit.
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which has this headline that's related to free speech being very bad on X.
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Pure Polly of Rage-Baiting and Empty Slogans Aren't What Canadians Need.
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And then there is this quote here from the article saying,
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We are beginning of being conned on a mass scale,
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and it's downright alarming how powerful social media platforms like X
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are allowing Russian-made propaganda to weaponize anger
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and fear to influence public opinion in our democracies.
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Have you guys been noticing a lot of Russian-made propaganda around?
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And Cult MTL pretending like people are being conned
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it's not like they're fighting bad information.
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they can kind of squint and see a bad poll number for pure Polly of.
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They pretend like Polly of is the most unpopular politician in Canada,
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despite the fact that they will always ignore Trudeau having bad numbers too,
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It's hard to dream small with a blue sky this big.
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And he links his blue sky account on his X page.
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Which, even if he stays on X and he keeps posting,
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this is a great strategy to make sure you are culturally irrelevant.
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He'll have like 1,500 followers there or whatever,
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Because they will only be stuck in a tiny echo chamber
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They are not going to talk to anyone who is not already on board
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And then his X account is going to start floundering,
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because now he's not getting an automatic 800 likes
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and, you know, 65 retweets on everything he posts.
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just cycling the same information over and over again between themselves.
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For the past year, I've been sharing links on this bad place,
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but now that the exodus to blue sky is in full swing,
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I thought also Substack was supposedly a bad place,
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and others on the right to just say whatever they wanted.
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here's the guy I don't even exactly dislike on the left.
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he's been standing up to a lot of the anti-Semites on the left,
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But now I see Jesse Brown making a very big category error
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I began using this account as a place to keep track of
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because the vast majority of anti-Semitism these days
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you have some guy like Dan Balzerian or whatever
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but everyone mostly just points and laughs at him on X,
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and everyone just doesn't take him seriously anymore.
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He's moving over with all the respectable anti-Semites
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and they'll be making up misinformation about Israel
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the way Ilhan Omar tries to stealthily accuse people of.