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.