The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. This may seem crazy to the hyper-political crowd but most people really do not see themselves as being part of this war where every single decision they make in their lives has to prioritize their side.
When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are.
If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky.
Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.
When it comes to CEO actions I'd unfortunately still choose Elon over Jackoff if the question is which site to use because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate.
Two evils, but one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas, so that's the what I would use. I don't have to follow the CEO on their platform.
AFAIK Jack Dorsey has not been affiliated with Bluesky for quite some time. I was thinking of Jay Graber, but actually she's not CEO anymore either. I don't know anything about the new guy TBH.
EDIT: Oops, I think I misinterpreted, you meant to compare Jack vs. Elon as CEOs of Twitter itself.
> because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate
Could you expand a bit on what you are referring to here?
There were many examples of Twitter censoring and suppressing people and subjects. Some of the best reporting of the time was from Matt Taibbi, who won awards for his reporting, sometimes called the "Twitter Files." These are some of the worst examples:
1. Internal records released in the Twitter Files showed employees used tools like “Search Blacklist”, “Trends Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify” against users. Verified examples included lockdown critic Dr Jay Bhattacharya, conservative commentator Dan Bongino, and political activist Charlie Kirk.
2. Twitter’s ranking systems could make replies much harder to see, collapse them beneath conversations, exclude posts from search/home feeds, and reduce distribution. Twitter itself admitted to hiding “questionable content” from replies, search and timelines as part of its enforcement system.
3. Twitter labelled and reduced the reach of claims it considered "misleading" about elections. Between 27 October and 11 November 2020 it classified around 300,000 tweets as "misleading". 456 users received warnings that also prevented normal liking, replying, or retweeting. Twitter estimated its interventions cut "quote-tweets" of "labelled" posts by about 29%.
4. In October 2020, less than three weeks before the presidential election, Twitter prevented users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden through both tweets and direct messages, and locked the Post's account. Twitter initially cited its "hacked-materials/private-information" rules even though it had not established that the material had been hacked. Jack Dorsey later acknowledged that blocking distribution publicly and privately had been a mistake.
5. Twitter adopted COVID-related rules under which staff would label users or tweets so they could be suppressed. By March 2021 Twitter said it had removed more than 8,400 tweets and “challenged” 11.5 million accounts under its COVID policies. Twitter explicitly stated that labelled COVID material could receive reduced visibility. This meant that legitimate political and scientific arguments about lockdowns, vaccines, and public-health policy could become moderation questions if Twitter classified them as "misinformation."
6. From 2018, Twitter's "hateful-conduct" rules explicitly prohibited "misgendering" or "deadnaming" of transgender people. Scores of users were permanently banned under these rules. In 2022, Twitter locked the Babylon Bee's account after it called transgender Biden administration official Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year”. Twitter required deletion of the tweet before normal access would resume.
7. Twitter permanently banned Trump in January 2021 after stating that two tweets "created a risk of further incitement of violence." These were the Tweets:
> “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
> “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
8. They maintained regular contact with US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Yoel Roth stated formally that from 2018 he had regular meetings with the FBI, DHS, and ODNI, including weekly discussions concerning anticipated 2020 election “hack-and-leak” operations. Internal records showed government agencies forwarding individual social-media posts to Twitter for review.
I will end by telling you of my personal experience during the worst years of Twitter. As someone who disagrees with San Francisco social orthodoxy on a few issues, I received an account warning for writing a rather milquetoast tweet about how I thought children should be allowed to grow up normally without medical intervention. For a few years, it was one of the most censorious places on the internet.
It's laughable to claim Elon supports free speech: he's the guy who will ban anyone for calling him out or challenging him (Google it if you don't believe me)
If you keep your feed on "following" instead of "for you", then the algorithm is irrelevant.
TBH I'm pretty confused why anyone uses "for you". For me at least, any time I accidentally wander over to that feed, the stuff it shows me is just dumb... not even political necessarily, just dumb clickbaity shit that insults my intelligence.
The only time I ever see hyper-political stuff is if I peek into the replies to a prominent politician. Highly recommend never doing that.
> The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice.
These people need to realize that what you see is what shapes your thinking and the social network's algorithm decides what you see and what you don't see. In the case of X, it's grok aka Mechahitler.
It's true that every now and then they do some sort of prompt engineering on Grok that turns it into mechahitler for a few hours, and it's quite weird and disturbing.
Most of the time though, it's actually pretty reasonable. Many times I've seen right-wingers try to ask grok to confirm their beliefs, only to have it shoot them down. Pretty funny honestly. Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer.
Wish we could find out what's actually going on there. Are they trying to bias Grok, but finding it's actually very hard to introduce subtle bias (as opposed to extreme, "mechahitler" bias)? That would be a fascinating and very positive result for LLMs in general.
Or is it that, like, the Grok team is resisting Elon's attempts to introduce bias, and when they can't resist any more, they intentionally overdo it, which gives them an excuse to roll it back?
Or is Elon's whole public persona a cynical performance intended to win power and political favors from Republican leadership while in private he actually isn't right-leaning at all and actually wants Grok to be a balanced truth machine for the good of humanity? lol, probably not, but it would explain a few things.
He made the "my heart goes out to you" motion (thump your hand over your heart, then fling it out towards the audience), people took a static image of the last part of it, and left out the context to create outrage bait for clicks.
Someone disagreeing with you on the interpretation of that event does not make him a Nazi. You need to take many steps back from the polarized thinking you are engaging in, because it ultimately harms you to lash out at people in this way.
One thing that's a occasionally annoying (because I deleted my account) but understandable is that a lot of the non-English speakers have stayed on X because it's easy for them to ignore the Nazis.
No. They don't have eyes, because its quite clear to anyone with half a brain that it's not a nazi salute, and is no different to the same hand gesture that democrats use. It's sad the loud minority still believe calling everyone a nazi or fascist bears any weight.
The comment is a lie. I live in a major US city. They marched through the city in 2025 (minimally) with white face masks, red armbands with the Nazi symbol, doing Nazi salutes. Saw with my own eyes or I would have also not believed it. Absolutely shameful.
> iirc your comments weren't even making any big statements, just giving out your simple opinions without even invoking any political beliefs
Initially I did type out more, but I didn't want to turn it into an argument, so I kept its simple.
I just don't like that the left keep spouting out that elon did a nazi salute when he didn't, and his gesture is no different to anything the democrats have done. But HN is frustrating like this. You try to keep it simple and neutral. Downvoted/flagged. You voice your opinion. Downvoted/flagged.
downvoting is expected, like on Reddit, but flagging comments like yours, that's a first for me
if people are so convinced that you and Elon are both super Nazis or something then why not show everyone what vile things you've typed here (iirc it was just "it was not a nazi salute." or something like that)
- Mamdani, who in contrast to Musk does mingle quite a lot in anti-Semite cirles
- Bernie Sanders, a Jew himself but that has never kept anyone from being called a nazi
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also often seen in anti-Semite circles
- Kamala Harris
- Elizabeth Warren, who later also supported nazi-tattoo candidate Graham Platner whom she called 'my type of man'
- Hillary Clinton
- ...and many others
Of course the legacy press has excuses for all these nazi-saluting individuals except for Musk, calling these photo's 'coincidental' or 'taken out of context'. The truth is that none of these individuals, Musk included, made nazi salutes but that is not what the narrative pushes and with that unfortunately also not what this here site - HN - accepts.
I think it's also that Elon is such an easy target as he's terminally online and always replies/retweets weird and controversial stuff
so all these social justice warriors pick the easiest target and point to some tweet/image and say "Nazi!" thinking they've done some great servitude to humanity and can now feel great about themselves.
kind of like using paper straws and patting yourself in the back
1. "you have said the actual truth" reply to some guy about the great replacement thing or mass migration? which was then followed up with an apology and he said it was one of the most foolish things he's ever done.
2. said George soros hates humanity
3. compared Trudeau to a Adolf Hitler
4. some WW2 photo with a Wehrmaht soldier with a caption as a meme
5. mocking those who called him a nazi by saying stuff like "bet you did Nazi that coming"
considering all the other kinds of things he's done and posted on Twitter, I'm not convinced he's an evil nazi yet
It is a fact that Musk is a Nazi. If someone publicly gives a Nazi salute and publicly endorses trash like the great replacement theory, I’m going to call them a Nazi, because that’s what they are.
If other CEOs say similar stuff in private, that’s really sad. If they ever say it publicly, I’ll call them Nazis as well.
The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. This may seem crazy to the hyper-political crowd but most people really do not see themselves as being part of this war where every single decision they make in their lives has to prioritize their side.
When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are.
If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky.
Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.
When it comes to CEO actions I'd unfortunately still choose Elon over Jackoff if the question is which site to use because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate.
Two evils, but one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas, so that's the what I would use. I don't have to follow the CEO on their platform.
AFAIK Jack Dorsey has not been affiliated with Bluesky for quite some time. I was thinking of Jay Graber, but actually she's not CEO anymore either. I don't know anything about the new guy TBH.
EDIT: Oops, I think I misinterpreted, you meant to compare Jack vs. Elon as CEOs of Twitter itself.
> because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate
Could you expand a bit on what you are referring to here?
There were many examples of Twitter censoring and suppressing people and subjects. Some of the best reporting of the time was from Matt Taibbi, who won awards for his reporting, sometimes called the "Twitter Files." These are some of the worst examples:
1. Internal records released in the Twitter Files showed employees used tools like “Search Blacklist”, “Trends Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify” against users. Verified examples included lockdown critic Dr Jay Bhattacharya, conservative commentator Dan Bongino, and political activist Charlie Kirk.
2. Twitter’s ranking systems could make replies much harder to see, collapse them beneath conversations, exclude posts from search/home feeds, and reduce distribution. Twitter itself admitted to hiding “questionable content” from replies, search and timelines as part of its enforcement system.
3. Twitter labelled and reduced the reach of claims it considered "misleading" about elections. Between 27 October and 11 November 2020 it classified around 300,000 tweets as "misleading". 456 users received warnings that also prevented normal liking, replying, or retweeting. Twitter estimated its interventions cut "quote-tweets" of "labelled" posts by about 29%.
4. In October 2020, less than three weeks before the presidential election, Twitter prevented users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden through both tweets and direct messages, and locked the Post's account. Twitter initially cited its "hacked-materials/private-information" rules even though it had not established that the material had been hacked. Jack Dorsey later acknowledged that blocking distribution publicly and privately had been a mistake.
5. Twitter adopted COVID-related rules under which staff would label users or tweets so they could be suppressed. By March 2021 Twitter said it had removed more than 8,400 tweets and “challenged” 11.5 million accounts under its COVID policies. Twitter explicitly stated that labelled COVID material could receive reduced visibility. This meant that legitimate political and scientific arguments about lockdowns, vaccines, and public-health policy could become moderation questions if Twitter classified them as "misinformation."
6. From 2018, Twitter's "hateful-conduct" rules explicitly prohibited "misgendering" or "deadnaming" of transgender people. Scores of users were permanently banned under these rules. In 2022, Twitter locked the Babylon Bee's account after it called transgender Biden administration official Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year”. Twitter required deletion of the tweet before normal access would resume.
7. Twitter permanently banned Trump in January 2021 after stating that two tweets "created a risk of further incitement of violence." These were the Tweets:
> “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
> “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
8. They maintained regular contact with US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Yoel Roth stated formally that from 2018 he had regular meetings with the FBI, DHS, and ODNI, including weekly discussions concerning anticipated 2020 election “hack-and-leak” operations. Internal records showed government agencies forwarding individual social-media posts to Twitter for review.
I will end by telling you of my personal experience during the worst years of Twitter. As someone who disagrees with San Francisco social orthodoxy on a few issues, I received an account warning for writing a rather milquetoast tweet about how I thought children should be allowed to grow up normally without medical intervention. For a few years, it was one of the most censorious places on the internet.
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It's laughable to claim Elon supports free speech: he's the guy who will ban anyone for calling him out or challenging him (Google it if you don't believe me)
Doesn’t Musk’s twitter prevent you from saying ‘cisgender’?
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If you keep your feed on "following" instead of "for you", then the algorithm is irrelevant.
TBH I'm pretty confused why anyone uses "for you". For me at least, any time I accidentally wander over to that feed, the stuff it shows me is just dumb... not even political necessarily, just dumb clickbaity shit that insults my intelligence.
The only time I ever see hyper-political stuff is if I peek into the replies to a prominent politician. Highly recommend never doing that.
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Elon was proven to manipulate and censor Twitter. So you should prefer neither.
I'm being downvoted by Elon's posse. But here's the evidence:
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/these-report...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0589g0dqq7o
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/04/x-twitter...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-elon-musk-uses-his...
https://apnews.com/article/musk-europe-politicians-influence...
> The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice.
These people need to realize that what you see is what shapes your thinking and the social network's algorithm decides what you see and what you don't see. In the case of X, it's grok aka Mechahitler.
It's true that every now and then they do some sort of prompt engineering on Grok that turns it into mechahitler for a few hours, and it's quite weird and disturbing.
Most of the time though, it's actually pretty reasonable. Many times I've seen right-wingers try to ask grok to confirm their beliefs, only to have it shoot them down. Pretty funny honestly. Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer.
Wish we could find out what's actually going on there. Are they trying to bias Grok, but finding it's actually very hard to introduce subtle bias (as opposed to extreme, "mechahitler" bias)? That would be a fascinating and very positive result for LLMs in general.
Or is it that, like, the Grok team is resisting Elon's attempts to introduce bias, and when they can't resist any more, they intentionally overdo it, which gives them an excuse to roll it back?
Or is Elon's whole public persona a cynical performance intended to win power and political favors from Republican leadership while in private he actually isn't right-leaning at all and actually wants Grok to be a balanced truth machine for the good of humanity? lol, probably not, but it would explain a few things.
> Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer.
Exactly. This means he will change the model to fit his world view.
Here's a study: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Nothing in that comment mentions force?
Figuring out how to make people actually care, and also figuring out how to make migration easier would both be a big deal.
Maybe forcing the platforms to make it possible to make followers/following portable would be worth it though.
Well, considering that never actually happened...
He made the "my heart goes out to you" motion (thump your hand over your heart, then fling it out towards the audience), people took a static image of the last part of it, and left out the context to create outrage bait for clicks.
Ah that makes sense. I didn’t realize Sieg Heil was German for “my heart goes out to you”
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Someone disagreeing with you on the interpretation of that event does not make him a Nazi. You need to take many steps back from the polarized thinking you are engaging in, because it ultimately harms you to lash out at people in this way.
One thing that's a occasionally annoying (because I deleted my account) but understandable is that a lot of the non-English speakers have stayed on X because it's easy for them to ignore the Nazis.
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I think it’s just literally anyone who sees your post and also has eyes.
No. They don't have eyes, because its quite clear to anyone with half a brain that it's not a nazi salute, and is no different to the same hand gesture that democrats use. It's sad the loud minority still believe calling everyone a nazi or fascist bears any weight.
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The comment is a lie. I live in a major US city. They marched through the city in 2025 (minimally) with white face masks, red armbands with the Nazi symbol, doing Nazi salutes. Saw with my own eyes or I would have also not believed it. Absolutely shameful.
Elon did?
As in Elon Musk? Specifically? No idea, wouldn’t be surprised, but I have no evidence that he did. But the post I’m responding to said
“No ones [sic] doing nazi salutes.”
So I didn’t read it as Elon Musk specifically. I would suggest you’re adding that in your mind and should reevaluate your fascination with him.
sure that I can disagree with, there definitely are people like that, there's billions of us after all
but I'm pretty sure he was referencing Elon there, as in there's no such thing as him doing such a salute
but hey, I can't even see the original post because it was flagged, like mine is now. so that's great.
I do think it’s interesting that in a conversation about nazis where Elon musk hadn’t been mentioned, that’s the first place your brain goes.
You heard “Nazi” and immediately thought “Elon”. Curious.
Oh sorry, to catch you up on the conversation. We are talking about Twitter, and we are discussing it on HN where the uneducated like to hate on Elon.
huh? that's literally the context of this thread.
how did you conclude that Elon wasn't mentioned?
Curious.
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I'm not really on either side that much but I just don't understand this overreaction, it's literally fascism, silencing the opposition
and censoring others by painting them as nazis/Hitler
iirc your comments weren't even making any big statements, just giving out your simple opinions without even invoking any political beliefs
IMO whoever is doing that should get their flagging abilities taken away.
> iirc your comments weren't even making any big statements, just giving out your simple opinions without even invoking any political beliefs
Initially I did type out more, but I didn't want to turn it into an argument, so I kept its simple.
I just don't like that the left keep spouting out that elon did a nazi salute when he didn't, and his gesture is no different to anything the democrats have done. But HN is frustrating like this. You try to keep it simple and neutral. Downvoted/flagged. You voice your opinion. Downvoted/flagged.
You’ve said a few times that it isn’t different to anything democrats have done. Can you point to some specific examples?
hagbard_c replied with a bunch of examples to the initial reply to me.
downvoting is expected, like on Reddit, but flagging comments like yours, that's a first for me
if people are so convinced that you and Elon are both super Nazis or something then why not show everyone what vile things you've typed here (iirc it was just "it was not a nazi salute." or something like that)
The same gesture was made by:
- Mamdani, who in contrast to Musk does mingle quite a lot in anti-Semite cirles
- Bernie Sanders, a Jew himself but that has never kept anyone from being called a nazi
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also often seen in anti-Semite circles
- Kamala Harris
- Elizabeth Warren, who later also supported nazi-tattoo candidate Graham Platner whom she called 'my type of man'
- Hillary Clinton
- ...and many others
Of course the legacy press has excuses for all these nazi-saluting individuals except for Musk, calling these photo's 'coincidental' or 'taken out of context'. The truth is that none of these individuals, Musk included, made nazi salutes but that is not what the narrative pushes and with that unfortunately also not what this here site - HN - accepts.
https://imgur.com/a/C2JsMfg (the others)
https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2PANC6Y/democratic-presidential-ho... (clinton)
wow, the Taylor swift one is way worse
Yes, and she still isn't a nazi.
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There are pictures, dude. What is wrong with you?
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if there's repeated statements and gestures to that effect on national TV and other mass publications, it's beyond "echo chamber" status...
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I think it's also that Elon is such an easy target as he's terminally online and always replies/retweets weird and controversial stuff
so all these social justice warriors pick the easiest target and point to some tweet/image and say "Nazi!" thinking they've done some great servitude to humanity and can now feel great about themselves.
kind of like using paper straws and patting yourself in the back
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so I found
1. "you have said the actual truth" reply to some guy about the great replacement thing or mass migration? which was then followed up with an apology and he said it was one of the most foolish things he's ever done.
2. said George soros hates humanity
3. compared Trudeau to a Adolf Hitler
4. some WW2 photo with a Wehrmaht soldier with a caption as a meme
5. mocking those who called him a nazi by saying stuff like "bet you did Nazi that coming"
considering all the other kinds of things he's done and posted on Twitter, I'm not convinced he's an evil nazi yet
What’s a super Nazi?
It is a fact that Musk is a Nazi. If someone publicly gives a Nazi salute and publicly endorses trash like the great replacement theory, I’m going to call them a Nazi, because that’s what they are.
If other CEOs say similar stuff in private, that’s really sad. If they ever say it publicly, I’ll call them Nazis as well.