| In one corner: Twitter! In the other corner: Threads! (In additional corners of the boxing polygon: Mastodon, Bluesky, Gab, Parler, Truth Social and Post.News.) The fight for microblogging supremacy has more contenders than anyone knows what to do with, but, as columnist Molly Roberts writes, Twitter is for now the indisputable champ. Paradoxically, it's also the only one that can actually kill Twitter. Molly explains why none of these upstarts have the slugging power: There are simply too many for a credible front-runner to emerge, and none have captured the addictive conflict that keeps users glued to Twitter. The greatest guarantor that Twitter's demise will have to come from within, she writes, is that "everyone is still too obsessed with Twitter to give something new a chance." Why else would even the emigrants to Bluesky be calling posts on the platform "skeets"? Twitter itself might be breaking down, but columnist Megan McArdle thinks the platform is helping something else suddenly work better than ever: conservative boycotts. Twitter began, Megan writes, as an "ideological free-for-all," but it wasn't long before progressive orthodoxies took root, creating what she calls a very public-facing "pseudo-consensus" that corporations accepted as gospel: "Twitter Brain convinced a lot of corporate bosses that controversial progressive views were actually quite mainstream." Then, Megan argues, Elon Musk came along and yanked moderation to the right, leaving corporations unsure of where their customers actually stood — and thus extra-susceptible to the loud-and-clear message of, say, a Bud Light boycott. Chaser: Not all corporations are giving in to anti-trans panic, and neither are all GOP politicians. Contributing columnist Kate Cohen lifts up the admirable Republicans resisting the legislative hysteria. |
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