The last US elections and the last DANA disaster that has devastated part of Albacete and the Valencian Community, have shown – once again – how X, formerly known as Twitter (and the name I will use until this social network closes) , has become a social network that you cannot trust to find quick information about events that are happening.
Misinformation has always been present in any medium that people use to inform ourselves and in the great times of Twitter, such as in the Egyptian revolution of 2011, on Twitter you found truthful information from people in situ, as well as false information.
But since Elon Musk bought Twitter and dismantled every organization focused on filtering misinformation, botnets and any organized system to publish garbage, you simply have to think, two, three and even four times that something published on X is actually real.
There is no social network without misinformation, much less a social network where there is a team up to the task to combat everything that may be being published and turns out not to be true, but these two great events have marked a personal before and after for my use of X .
Although I stopped using it since Elon Musk took control of the company, for a couple of weeks now I have not had its application installed or I have gone in to find out more. I still have contacts I’m interested in who use it and that’s the only reason I haven’t deactivated my account.
But there is life beyond X and, although none is perfect, there is no doubt that anything is better than the current state of
- Bluesky is one of the social networks that has grown the most thanks to users who have run away from X. This social network has just added 700,000 usersespecially from the United States, after the elections for the country’s presidency.
- ThreadsMeta’s answer to X, is an increasingly interesting social network, but you can forget about following current news on it. Meta is very clear in how it uses its algorithm and its CEO, Adam Mosseri, has commented several times that news is not something that interests them due to its great complexity when it comes to moderating it.
- Instagram It has become an increasingly important current social network, but especially through aggregator accounts. It is difficult to find news unless someone forwards it to you.
- Mastodon It is the last in contention. It is the X-style social network in which I took refuge when I left Twitter and where I find the most interesting content, especially if you are a person interested in technology, security and those dark places on the internet.
Personally, I have gone from using X at all hours for absolutely everything, to using various platforms to inform myself, keep in touch with friends, family and acquaintances; also for entertainment.
The only problem is finding those people you follow on X and they may or may not be on the social network you end up choosing, if not all at the same time. That is a problem that decentralized platforms are supposed to fix by being interconnected.
Finally, my biggest recommendation that I can give you to try to keep track of these sites, especially Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads, as they are set up under a decentralized protocol, is to use Openvibe, an excellent application to add these three social networks that allows you to read and publish content at the same time.
(This article is part of the Unclick newsletter, Computer Hoy’s newsletter, where we write about technology from a personal point of view. You can subscribe for free.)
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Tags: Twitter