I’m a relative newbie to Twitter. I avoided joining for many years because a) I only had so many minutes of my life a day to give to social media and b) it had a reputation for being sort of a snake pit. I just didn’t need that. Enter Covid, the vax reign of fear, the 2020 election aftermath, it got more complicated. In fact, I wouldn’t have stayed viable on Twitter with my views then as it became even more of a far-left echo chamber making vengeance on all dissenters. News of the impending acquisition in 2022 changed my mind about all of that and I dove in.
Fast forward to February 2023. I’m a moderate user, I post these NER article links and short quips, organic insta-reactions to the news I see. I follow conservatives or those tolerant of conservatives, but I comment often on automatically fed progressive posts. Exposure to hater riff raff is nominal. Those that do fit that description tend to be off focus, angry, I suspect, relatively young, and far more interested in hurling personal insults than engaging with an intelligent counter point to what I posted. Frankly, their personality profile aligns with what I imagined of many former Twitter staffers.
One of the off-focus reactions that have been hurled at me is regarding my acquisition of the blue check, insinuating as if I’ve vainly purchased convenience store credibility. They, the angry young leftist, feel that it’s an easy score to point out that I’d pay $8 to float my validity and visibility a little higher, unlike the leftist brahmins of the prior Twitter regime that had it handed to them for free for their regime loyalty. So why did/do I pay for the blue check? My initial objective was indeed to buoy my visibility. I run a website, that costs money, I make no revenue from it. That ‘why’ is explained further in the about sections of NortheastReader.com . What’s $8 more?
I used to subscribe to numerous print magazines back in the paleolithic era of media, I don’t anymore. My total cost to speak online is roughly equivalent to what I used to pay to read media sources offline, and by that, I mean twenty to forty years ago. What I have paid for media has been and remains a small but important priority. I read from hundreds of web sources with free access, I pay something back to that environment by my own contribution via Northeast Reader.
Apart from the visibility factor, I didn’t immediately hit the go switch on the blue check. One further realization had to present itself first. Elon Musk put his entire enterprise at risk to correct something that had turned into a grotesque cancer, as it turned out, even in the estimation of Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s founders. I would never have become involved with Twitter had Musk not proposed the buyout. Eight dollars is a small amount to pay to chip in and support the single most important media move of the decade if not the century. I do it to support Elon Musk and to signify my gratefulness for his saving the First Amendment and maybe all of our democracy in the process.
What will eight dollars buy you? $8 is a pretty small price to save Western civilization from the progressive left.
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