Twitter won't get better

There was one time I was sorry I wasn't on Twitter. I clicked on a tweet by J. Elvis Weinstein. His brother was a teacher who was tweeting from a Jeopardy-like game they were playing with students at his middle school. There was a question, what is an implement used for spreading butter? He made fun of the children for not knowing. I assume the answer was "butter knife" but none of the kids ventured a guess. 

If I had been on Twitter, I would have pointed out that you don't spread with a butter knife. The whole point of a butter knife is to not get crumbs in the butter. The tweenagers just had better table etiquette than their teacher. I could have shamed a teacher who was humiliating his students, but signing up on Twitter would have been a high price to pay.

I don't think Twitter is going to get better. Elon Musk's talk about free speech sounds good in it's way, but it doesn't work out.

There was a pacifist group here that would have a different speaker each week. These were public events. They were under constant attack from local Zionists, so the founder of the group who was about to have his 100th birthday decided to make it a "free speech" group instead. It was a disaster. It resulted in an influx of white supremacists, white separatists, anti-feminists; there was a white guy who had converted to Hinduism in old age and used this as an excuse for hating Muslims. Another was an old Jewish guy who was a Holocaust denier.

If the group had as its purpose to advocate or defend free speech it might have been interesting, but just having a forum for old cranks didn't work. No serious person would participate after that. 

It fell apart after a wave of protests. Anarchists and Zionists formed their own unholy alliance. Their leader was an elderly "peace activist", a Quaker who couldn't see Jews as anything but innocent victims. He thought he was sticking up for the little guy by supporting Israel's war on Palestinians.