Summary

Over 60 German and Austrian universities and research institutions announced their exit from Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), citing the platform’s promotion of right-wing populist content and its incompatibility with democratic and scientific values.

This follows Germany’s Federal Court of Justice and trade unions leaving the platform.

The German government is also debating a withdrawal, expressing concerns over X’s polarizing effect on political discourse.

The departure comes after Musk’s public support for Germany’s far-right AfD party and a live talk with its leader Alice Weidel ahead of upcoming elections.

  • @xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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    964 months ago

    Leave it and…

    Leave it and…

    block that steaming pile of garbage.

    It’s critical to make this asshat’s soapbox irrelevant.

    • @disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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      284 months ago

      That’s a cartoon waiting to happen. Musk jumping up and down on his dilapidated soapbox, in the center of X plaza, surrounded only by his bots. It’s the glorious final stage of the echo chamber.

  • @octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    Please rest of the world - SHUN Musk and to whatever degree you can, also Trump, exactly like this. Their egos can’t handle it, and your efforts to de-legitimize them both may be one of our most effective weapons to limit the damage they do.

  • @PedroMaldonado@lemmy.world
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    174 months ago

    Godammit, elon. All you had to do was be cool. Coast on that "visionary’ crap and keep on winning life. But, no. You are just and asshole. Jerk.

  • @affiliate@lemmy.world
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    -174 months ago

    this is just like what mark zuckerberg said about all of europe having “too much censorship” and “making innovation impossible”. but i guess if germany really cared about being unbiased they would have moved all their institutions to texas by now or something.

  • @etuomaala@sopuli.xyz
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    4 months ago

    Leave Twitter and go where?

    With this question unanswered, the sentiment is not very powerful.

    Worse, if the answer is “go to Bluesky” or some other institution with a trust structure identical to Twitter, the sentiment is totally meaningless.

    • @Rooty@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Here’s a wild idea - go to the official website of the institution and click the “news” tab.

      It’s like people forgot how the World Wide Web works.

          • @etuomaala@sopuli.xyz
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            -54 months ago

            Yeah, I thought of that. RSS doesn’t actually do push notifications, though. At least, I’m pretty sure. It’s based on polling from the subscribers’ clients.

            • @randomuser38529@lemmy.world
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              104 months ago

              I don’t remember all the technobabble but am almost sure Apple push notifications are actually ’pulled’.

              Regardless, there are some sweet RSS reader apps which make it seem like push notifications.

              This solves spreading the news.

              • @etuomaala@sopuli.xyz
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                24 months ago

                Mobile push notifications really are pushed. It’s actually quite a fascinating problem, because phones are suspended to RAM most of the time and network events need to be able to wake a phone from this state.

                In Android Land, just one notification system, called Firebase Cloud Messaging, handles almost all of the push notifications. And it’s controlled by Google lol. The situation is similar in Apple Land.

      • @etuomaala@sopuli.xyz
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        -34 months ago

        The point is that they didn’t give an alternative in the article. AP is obviously what I would recommend.

    • @Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.world
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      64 months ago

      It is not meaningless to deny X/Twitter content and legitimacy. It may not be the solution you want but it ultimately hurts X/Twitter which hurts Elon. That’s all that matters to most people.

    • @Saryn@lemmy.world
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      54 months ago

      How about just quiting without replacing it with something else? Everyone desperately needs to stop using social media like a crack addict needs to stop doing crack. Shitter, FB, IG, TokTik, etc - it’s all utter, utter shit.

      • @etuomaala@sopuli.xyz
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        24 months ago

        Organisations use things like Twitter to broadcast news as push notifications to a large audience of subscribers. This is something that they’re going to want to keep doing, and is only one aspect of social media. On its own, I don’t see this ability as being damaging. They’re basically just using Twitter as a more efficient mailing list. Things only get bad when opaque AIs start ranking shit and publishing to non-subscribers.

        ActivityPub does provide a really good way to reproduce this ability. It is a good solution.

        Bluesky is just another Twitter, subject to all of the same drawbacks. The only difference between the two of them is four years.

        • @Saryn@lemmy.world
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          14 months ago

          There are plenty of ways for governments to engage in strategic communications without having to rely on social media, especially when said platforms are disentangling the fabric of society before our very eyes. Moreover, government communication (and 99% of other communication processes) does not require the constant and immediate production and consumption of information that social media are purposefully designed for. Pretending like people are addicted to social media because we really want to stay in touch with policy is just silly.

          And no, one thing is not equivalent to another thing just because they belong in the same category of things. Editorial and privacy policies, ownership structures, the extent to which a company or its owners are politically exposed - these are all things that can differ drastically from one actor to another.

          • @etuomaala@sopuli.xyz
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            24 months ago

            So to be clear, I don’t need to make an account on bluesky’s servers at all in order to participate in their network?

              • @etuomaala@sopuli.xyz
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                04 months ago

                Neat, I guess, but for as long as it’s Bluesky servers handling all of the actual real accounts, it’s no different from Twitter.

                Meanwhile, AP already has hundreds of independent servers each with their own accounts.

                • @Glasgow@lemmy.ml
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                  4 months ago

                  I mean that is just objectively wrong. There are clear differences between it and Twitter.

                  Mastodon is dogshit and will never gain popularity until they fix it to be more like bsky so it’s irrelevant.