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Tweets of the Week May 14 2923--The End [1]

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Date: 2023-05-14

I’m sorry, but Twitter has finally stepped over a line that I am not prepared to cross with them. I hesitantly invite you to check out this NBC story on the problem as well as this blog entry. I say “hesitantly” because the stories contain descriptions of animal cruelty videos that will live in my head for weeks. I’m not at all ashamed to say that I was triggered.

And that’s the line they’ve crossed. Elon Musk’s motivation for virtually ending Twitter moderation was, as we all know, to give a free rein to hate speech on his platform. But, inevitably, this policy (or lack of a policy) has allowed the worst kind of animal torture to be freely posted. Even a simple, innocent search, like “cat,” triggers Twitter’s horrible algorithm to suggest the worst animal cruelty video you can imagine. I’m not exaggerating—if you can imagine something terrible being done to an animal, it’s probably available.

For my own mental well-being, as well as for obvious moral reasons, I can no longer participate in or even view most of Twitter. Therefore, after seven years of posting my weekly collections of the funny stuff on Twitter, TOTW has been rendered untenable. This will be the last installment, unless someone else wants to take over.

Some will point out that the type of videos I am describing have been available on Twitter almost since Musk took over, if not longer. Perhaps so, but I am just finding out how bad the problem is. I hope that you’ll agree that acting late is often better than not acting at all.

I may return with a similar feature covering one of the Twitter alternates, if I ever figure out which one I like best. I will be spending more time checking out Spoutible and Mastodon, and would love to get a Bluesky invite so I can check them out as well. Until then, I’ll be going dark for a while.

I make no judgment of anyone who chooses to maintain their Twitter presence, including choosing to share Twitter’s funny stuff with anyone, although I would strongly suggest you turn of autoplay for Twitter videos. But it’s not something I can do any more. Thanks for checking out TOTW for the last seven years, and let’s see what happens next.

x sometimes we need friends like him in our life pic.twitter.com/K8nAHOJ9dm — Puppies 🐶 (@PuppiesIover) May 11, 2023

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