To Tweet or not to Tweet?

To Tweet or not to Tweet, that is the question.  

I joined Twitter relatively early on.  I don't recall exactly when but I think it was 2009.  I joined #TCOT (short for Top Conservatives on Twitter) and began connecting.  My account grew to the point I had roughly 14,000 followers. Then, they started disappearing.  Twitter purged vast swaths of my followers claiming that they were largely bots.

I was almost convinced. Almost.

I saw over they years my follower pool dwindle to below 9,000. It would seem they felt 50% of my followers were bots.  Some I'd even had private DMs with.  So.. not bots.  It's also possible my tweets grew increasingly unappealing.  But they hadn't changed much.  It's also possible I was unfollowed frequently because perhaps I'd been shadow-banned.  O have no idea.

But when Twitter started banning prominent conservatives for specious reasons I knew for sure the game was fixed. I hung around until around 2018 or so (I forget exactly when), at the time believing every voice still mattered, even if we were shouting into a leftist hurricane.  But I finally relented and quit Twitter.

Now Elon Musk is set to take the helm, promising to change the platform's leftist agenda back into a free speech vehicle.  I could go back.  I do have a Parler account, a Gettr account and I was eagerly awaiting an offering from Truth Social.  But Twitter is an established platform.

Still going back is no simple matter. I would have to rebuild my entire account from scratch; my follows, my followers, my link to this blog.  I could just as easily do that on another platform. So what advantage does it hold?  All the leftists are going to leave?  So what? They aren't on Parler either.

Then there's the question of Elon Musk's intent.  He claims to be a free speech advocate and I applaud him for that.  But I don't fully trust him.  Maybe he has been red pilled, but what if he's trolling us all?  We've been tricked before.  Remember 2020 when Fox News called Arizona for Let's Go Brandon even before CNN or any of the liberal networks.  Fox is no longer the network it once was.  Perhaps Elon Musk ends up doing the same things that Twitter has been doing to conservatives for the last decade.  Or perhaps he's just no different from Jeff Bezos.  He sees a way to tilt the playing field in his favor and is using Twitter just as Bezos uses the Washington Post - for political leverage.  The net result for conservatives would be the same.  Just as leftists find themselves defending Big Pharma, what if we on the right find ourselves in 2 or 3 years defending Big Electric because we've been sucked into another iteration of Establishment Rule Continued?

I don't think that's impossible.  When you've been burned once it behooves you to be more careful going forward.  All that aside, I'm very likely going to rejoin Twitter. But I'm not going to abandon the other alternatives because depending on one guy for all the answers, even if he is on the up and up, is just not smart.