The problem with this kind of talk is that it refuses to acknowledge how much of X’s traffic - all the social media traffic - comes from outside the US now, from non-English speaking countries who don’t care about your bullshit, so long as the platform keeps working for them. Americans are having a very hard time with that.
So you shake your finger at the people whose language you speak, but it doesn’t matter if all of them decide you’re right and drop the platform. There will still be millions of users. Your shaming act is not appropriate.
Even ignoring that, a lot of these people have no business model without X, specifically. I’ve heard tons of them moan about not finding another platform like it. You need both reach and the ability to post furry wolf cock drawings without consequence. These parasites would all have to drop their bullshit and go get punchclock jobs if they didn’t have X, they would have to give up their parasocial position over others without it, which means no amount of your liberal white woman shaming is ever going to be enough.
The really ugly truth is that all the normal-ass people who don’t make their money online have abandoned X already, all that’s left is this huge army of grifters and whoever is still there for the porn. It makes me mad, because I deliberately left the site before Elon even breathed a word about buying it, but it follows you everywhere like a disease wanting a host.
All these pricks went to Mastodon and brought their Twitter shit with them. They even bullied somebody into giving them an algorithmic feed. Now Mastodon is shit, too, and this woman is part of the problem. Shut up. Stop farming attention and leave an inch of space for the people who don’t want to be part of your personal business model. Fuck you, as well, lady. Fuck all you parasocials.
This is the fundamental problem with protecting a candidate whose entire base is really big on guns, big on having guns on them, big on using every inch of their already permissive rights, and no matter what, the candidate’s rally is a highly likely place for them to flex their pieces, even if they can only wave them around in the parking lot.
You can’t just do the obvious thing and put rounds in everyone you see with a rifle. White girls are going to be out in the parking lot doing influencer dances with AR-15s. The muzzle might wave in Trump’s direction while she boot scoots. We don’t know what kind of orders that sniper had, but probably something along the lines of “look all these fuckers are going to be strapped if they can be strapped, stay chilly on the trigger and think twice, take no shots without orders.”
By the time anybody acted like a clear threat, the bullets were already flying. So what if he had a rangefinder? That doesn’t count as a “pull trigger now” level threat, not with this crowd. What an absolute bastard of a thing to provide overwatch for, you know?