Para mis amigos, todo; para mis enemigos, la ley
-Maybe Oscar Benavides, maybe not
The problem with Twitter is that it no longer exists, but people continue to pretend that it does.
A Logo from a happier… or less sad… time
I get it. Twitter was, if not an ideal social media platform, at least one that found positive uses beyond other options available.
So when Elon bought it back in late 2022 there was a hope after his initial blunders running it as a business that he might come to his senses.
This was based on the mistaken assumption that he bought Twitter to run as a business. It has become clear that did not. The general consensus today is that he bought it because it was an influential media platform and he wanted to control it so it would spread ideas of which he approved.
This has happened here in the US a lot in the last few years. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post and turned it into a pro-Trump mouthpiece. Patrick Soon-Shiong likewise bought the LA Times and likewise turned its editorial policy to a pro-Trump stance. And, more recently, David Ellison, nepobaby fail son of Larry Ellison, has used his father’s money to buy up Paramount and CBS, getting approval of the administration by promising to make CBS News a pro-Trump outlet as well. This was accomplished by putting blogger Bari Weiss in charge, who has ordered stories the Trump administration did not like yanked and who has put a Trump sycophant in as the main news anchor.
And there are more examples I am sure. You’re local TV station is more likely than not to be owned by a Trump loyalist.
Billionaires for Trump is a thing, but it was always a thing. As the saying goes, democracy is good for business, but business is bad for democracy. Or maybe that should be “billionaires” rather than “business” these days. If those billionaires don’t stand up for themselves… they might have to pay their share in taxes, and that could lead to poor people getting health care or something else deemed to be “communism” by the red state masses.
But in all of that it feels like Elon got the best deal when buying a media mouth piece to promote what passes for an ethos in him.
That $44 billion bought him and his noxious white nationalist fantasies more reach than any of those others. I mean, it is an outrage what the editorial boards of The Washington Post or the LA Times (or the NY Times for that matter, but that is a symptom of a different problem), but as pundits often point out, who actually gets a physical copy of a newspaper these days? Your grandfather?
More so, one can assign value and treat the sources with the respect, or lack thereof, that they deserve. CBS News and 60 Minutes haven’t been prefect over the years, but now they are demonstrably a clown show and they now stand as an unpopular alternative to Fox News.
But Twitter cum X… that gets treated differently. Most groups give it a pass. News outlets, businesses, government agencies, they continue to view it as a neutral platform despite Elon changing the rules and tweaking the algorithm to promote noxious points of view.
And people get angry when you point that out. They will claim that their work requires them to be active on X because it is an important platform. They reject the “nazi bar” analogy, the idea that if you engage on a platform the hosts and actively promotes nazi ideals that it broadcasts to people that you’re okay with nazis and are fine normalizing nazis as a part of society.
Hanging with nazis is not a line many people, companies, or government agencies have trouble crossing it seems. Blizzard, CCP, Daybreak, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Macy’s, my healthcare provider, my local city government and police department; all fine with nazis it seems. Don’t mind hanging with them one bit.
I mean… fuck… my own department at the State of California has the X logo on its main page.
Yes, there is a difference between being on a platform that hosts and promotes nazi ideals and actually being a nazi. Blizzard hasn’t started posting great replacement theory memes set in The Barrens or anything. Not yet. And I am sure someone from each of those entities I noted, or the many more that put the logo on their site, would argue with me about Elon or X being whatever it is they think I am saying it is.
But what about porn?
What about revenge porn? What about child porn?
I ask because that is the current controversy being ignored by people over on X.com.
The big attraction of the platform right now is that the integrated Grok AI is that you can take pictures of people… women, really, because they are almost always the target… and prompt Grok to redo the image with the subject in a bikini… or naked… or naked and bent over exposing themselves more fully… or naked and bent over and doing, or having done to them, whatever you would like.
X.com has taken a very “boys will be boys” attitude to the whole thing. If you want it to make naked pictures of Holly Longdale, Grok will do it and X.com won’t remove it unless you file a DMCA, even if you make it a 13 year old version of her.
Because Grok will supply you with child porn, you just have to ask.
This all feels like something that Republicans should be up in arms about. I mean, they claim to be against these sorts of things. One of the very few bills that the Republican controlled congress had the energy to push through was the TAKE DOWN act, which passed back in May.
But there has been no outrage from the right on this. “Republican morality” is an oxymoron. Elon spent nearly $300 million on the 2024 elections, so he gets to do what he wants and the government will look the other way. Another wise investment, buying an four year supply of indulgences up front.
As with so much, we are depending on the EU to do something about this because the current administration is actively disinterested in enforcing any law against somebody they view as an ally. Drug dealers, fraudsters, violent criminals, they get pardons so long as they are viewed as pro-Trump. So Elon running an AI driven revenge porn site, not a problem for the US government.
Those setting up a totalitarian regime always create an “in” class and an “out” class of people. The former the law protects but does not constrain, while the latter is constrained by the law but not protected by it.
Or, as the quote at the top of the post succinctly puts it in the original Spanish, “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
So if you support Trump you get a pass on everything, but if you are against him… well, ICE is allowed to assault, batter, detain, and now even execute US citizens in the streets now on the flimsiest of pretenses. The vice president has declared they have absolute immunity in their actions. Welcome to the budding dictatorship.
But I cannot do anything about that. That is what the American people voted for. Our only hope is that the whole thing will collapse under the weight of its own incompetence.
In the midst of all of that Activision, Blizzard, XBox, CCP, Valve, ArenaNet, and many, many more maintain an active presence on X.
It isn’t even like they’re being asked to, you know, resist. And a lot of them are run by billionaires, so they are always going to be pro-Republican in the end. But it is it too much to ask that they not be fine with nazis and revenge porn and all of that?
I guess so. They all have that site’s logo proudly displayed on their own sites. Many went through the effort of updating the old bird logo to the new X, so it isn’t even a matter of “Oh, is that still there? We forgot about that.” They are on board with the whole thing.
So what should a person even do given all that? I don’t know. I wrote to my local city government asking why they maintained a presence on the platform. I expect no response. I expect I would be ignored or laughed at by any entity I have mentioned.
This started brewing in the back of my brain when it came up that John Carmack was bemoaning that some people have left X.
John Carmack on X
I’ll transcribe that for those who cannot see the image:
John Carmack
@ID_AA_Carmack
It would be nice if some of the Twitter diaspora returned. So many creatives, but also many developers, that generally enriched the experience are no longer active.
Those that performatively left and those with a seething hatred of Elon probably won’t be back soon, but a lot of people just disengaged on vague cultural grounds that can be reevaluated.
There are probably some technical tweaks to the algorithm that could make them more comfortable. I don’t mind the existence of independent echo chambers that people are happy within. There is only a problem when some echo chambers are allowed and others aren’t.
Reach out to lapsed friends!
8:07 AM · Jan 7, 2026 · 165.3K Views
The complete lack of self-awareness contained in that post is just mind blowing. Being against nazis or revenge porn is a performative stance in his book and we should just all get over it so he can get back to the old Twitter experience.
That is my charitable view of his take. I too would like the return of 2015 Twitter. But that ain’t gonna happen.
Less charitable would be to assume that he is on the “I shouldn’t feel any social stigma for having noxious views” bandwagon, a point of view that disregards the literal foundations of society.
But he has also gone on to work on AGI, so he is probably a lost cause, having moved on to seeking out the latest grift rather than making something or value.
I pick on video game companies more than others in this post largely because I focus on them on the blog. But the problem is endemic. Very few companies have stepped away from X, no matter what Elon has done.
I don’t have any pithy or revelatory conclusion here aside from the fact that people will live in the past and pretend things haven’t changed for the worse or find excuses to remain.
Well, that and the usual message that corporations are not people and are certainly not your friend and will support things that will actively harm you so long as there is even the slimmest financial advantage in it.
Microsoft, as an example, will remain on X because X as a platform meets the needs of the shareholders. I suspect somebody there would argue that Microsoft has a fiduciary responsibility to stay on X.
Addendum:
Of course, I wrote all of that and didn’t think I’d need say more, then I saw Tim Sweeney come along to defend AI generated child porn.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, Worst CEO in Gaming?
So there is that to remind us that being a billionaire doesn’t make you smart, just greedy. Tim Sweeney has become the Marc Andreesen of video games; an angry old guy who feels that any law or regulation that obligates him in anyway is part of a vast political conspiracy against him.
I guess that does give me a bit of a summary. I am often saying that corporations are not people so cannot be our “friends” or whatever. Also, you can’t cut off every business that has some bad actor in it.
But here we have two corporations, X and Epic Games, each wholly run by an objectively bad individuals. Maybe we could just say no to their BS and walk away?
Neither are indispensable in any way.
Addendum 2:
Or maybe Elon’s neglect of X and his haphazard management of features will just break the whole thing and we’ll be rid of that one problem altogether. Yesterday gave us hope of that.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco remains dead!
Close to nothing of value would be lost at this point.
Yes, the rest of our problems, including our rogue government, remain. But it would be a step in the right direction. Maybe getting some people out of the nazi porn hothouse will improve things.
Oh well, it looks like got it fixed. Still, we were all probably better off for a while.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
