Anne Hidalgo, whose opponents have used the platform to criticise her, citied disinformation and antisemitism as reasons for leaving
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has announced she is quitting X, formerly Twitter, calling it a “gigantic global sewer” that is “destroying our democracies” by spreading abuse and misinformation.
After buying Twitter in 2022, the billionaire Elon Musk laid off thousands of employees, including many who moderated content on the platform. Rebranded as X, it has lost several major advertisers and has been criticised, including by the White House, for not doing enough to curtail antisemitism.
“I have made the decision to leave Twitter,” Hidalgo wrote in lengthy posts in English and French on Monday, citing manipulation, disinformation, antisemitism and attacks on scientists, climatologists, women and liberals.
It’s hugelly different.
You see, physical faeces are something people produce and have to excrete, as a side-effect of feeding not because they want to, and they have to eat to stay alive. Whilst there are some ways to reduce the amount of faeces produced, they’re generally unhealthy, so people have no safe choice other than producing said physical feaces and can’t really hold them in for long before there’s a burst intestine, which can be deadly, hence have no choice than to excrete it.
So sewages dispose of, let’s call it, unavoidable shit.
Mental faeces, on the other hand, do not at at all need to be produced, and even if produced need not be excreted. Further, unlike physical faeces, they are not produced as a side effect of feeding and rather are generally produced as a side effect of exposure to other people’s excreted mental faeces.
X, unlike sewages, does not dispose of mental faeces, rather it both incentivies people to excrete their mental faeces instead of keeping them in and displays them prominetly for others to see which in turn increases the production of mental faeces in other people.
So X is almost the very opposite of sewages: the latter dispose of the kind of shit that’s an unavoidable side effect of being alive whilst the former incentivises the excretion of and increases the exposure to the kind of shit that would otherwise exist only in the minds of a minority of people, plus in doing so increases the production of that kind of shit in previously unaffected humans - in other words, sewages reduce exposure to and harm from physical shit whilst X not only increases exposure to and the harm from mental shit, it even increases production of it.