Donald Trump was on Twitter from pre-2016 until 2021. Elon Musk bought Twitter, and restored his access in 2022.

Trump was on Twitter in 2016, before Musk. So was the far right, and well before that as well. Which is my point: the ground was laid on social media well before Musk's takeover and well before Trump. My point: It has been proven it is possible to move the needle with the rules stacked against you.

It has not been proven it is possible to move the needle with an ideologue who has full personal control over the platform constantly and aggressively yanking the needle in the opposite direction! Quite the opposite! Again, all of this is about how Musk has successfully naturalized Nazis winning.

I agree, that has not been proven, and maybe it's not possible! But saying that it is IMPOSSIBLE has also not been proven. My entire point is that most of us *do not know*, and it is premature to make black and white points on this. I say this as someone who left behind X as my main platform.

my best guess is that the ceiling on a forum raid against hostile mods is pretty low but not zero; the primary objective is probably destructive entryism designed to degrade the utility of the forum to its owners.

the mod dynamics at X are interesting, because obviously the owner is a fascist, but the employees are, well, you can literally see it here: www.opensecrets.org/orgs/x-inc/r...

in the 2024 election cycle X employees gave more to Katie Porter's congressional campaign than to Donald Trump's presidential run.

now of course mod power is not evenly distributed among the employee base and any employee who breaks rank too obviously will be fired, but the inside-outside game of forum raid with traitorous mods is very available.

it's clear that X derives a lot of its value by keeping non-fascist journalists on the platform. periodically they come here and tell us that they can ignore fascist and racist abuse, but that the lib-left scolding of bluesky is intolerable. I don't know if this is true, but if it is:

one obvious lib-left raid objective might be to bring obnoxious lib-left scolding back to X, to chase off the centrist influencers who might otherwise tolerate it.

By that logic no one has proved it is impossible to fly like Superman if you wish hard enough

I have no idea what standard of proof you're looking for. He's been running the site for three-plus years and it only ever changes in one direction. Posts get no engagement. Links are suppressed. People rampage around with racial slurs in their usernames. Reversing this through effort is a fantasy.

In fighting parlance, it is called leading with your face.

Interjecting here to note that it was not *social media activity* that moved the needle pre-Musk ownership, but *political action off social media* — ie, a rightwing pressure campaign to convince Facebook and Twitter that they were biased towards liberals and to tweak policy accordingly

No, you must not have followed this closely. Every extremist researcher can tell you how they worked. RW and Nazis quite specifically worked to evade controls and radicalize online long before musk. 1000s of pages of their leaked chats show this. All of this was happening simultaneously.

The post you were originally trying to dunk on was explicitly and specifically about how doomed it is to try to win the game *on the platform owned and aggressively manipulated by a far-right billionaire*