01/01/2025
Blue Sky vs X/Twitter: Our Perspective by Verona Silenda & Larry O’Hara
Digital civil war is rife. Cyber-attacks by Russia China North Korea & even before that by the US/their British poodle (check out James Risen's books if you doubt the last points). Not forgetting straightforward crooks.
We are thinking here of the Blue Sky vs Twitter/X debate. Precipitating a year-end redesign of our business card (see below: originals will be better!).
No doubt Musk is dangerous (his AI antics alone show that), and added to his role at the Court of Trump (vile but no fascist btw) he supports Far Right causes e.g. the AFD in Germany. Add to that since he took over X Musk has reinstated some (not all: e.g. Patriotic Alternative) Far Right accounts, and X has been used to spread misinformation about especially the Summer 2024 Southport attacks: all valid reasons for decent people to quit X entirely, as an irredeemable swamp.
At this point, a note of caution. Not only has the father of the alleged Southport attacker a potentially genocidal past, or at least questions to answer, the suspect has now been charged with terrorism offences.
When it comes to disinformation, the mainstream media do an excellent job: over and above lies about weapons of mass destruction, what about repeated claims Jeremy Corbyn is anti-Semitic, while treating war criminal Tony Blair as an elder statesman? The BBC even employs CV forger and cyber-village idiot Marianna Spring as a ‘Disinformation Correspondent’ FFS. Almost funny.
Very recently nowhere in the description of late US President Jimmy Carter’s career is there mention of treasonable collusion between George Bush and the Iranians to ensure the 1979 rescue mission failed leading to Carter losing the 1980 election: on which see Gary Sick’s book ‘The October Surprise’.
WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?
Left/liberal disdain for Twitter/X boils down to two things:
1) The internet itself encourages echo-chambers, where people only interact with the like-minded. But if you want to change the world you have to engage with people not of like mind. No other way.
2) On X (unlike Blue Sky) once somebody puts a critical comment on a post it can't be removed without deleting everything related. To be honest, we at NFB like that, as many powerful voices want to drown us out. This makes it harder.
Don’t get us wrong: Blue Sky is a great idea, why we joined. The atmosphere does seem for now a lot less fetid than X. But back in the day mass street political meetings, & Leftist papers sold outside stations and factories were attempts to connect to the unconverted. Blue Sky is not.
We at NFB know the internet fosters a shallow and transient attention-span/mitigates against developing & understanding complex arguments (see Nicholas Carr/Susan Greenfield etc.). For this reason no links in this article.
NFB is on Blue Sky and Facebook/Instagram, but also (for now) Twitter/X too. Responses welcome.
