On the X and Meta Questions…
By 
Hey all; we are receiving reports that folks have been getting “banned” messages over the last few days when trying to comment. This appears (mostly) to be a Disqus issue; generally speaking, unless you know why you’ve been banned you probably haven’t been banned. I’ve been redirecting inquiries in the direction of Disqus, but it seems that the issue is not affecting users with any consistency.
While I have you here, this question of X links came up again in comments and I want to reclarify my own policy. Despite requests from commenters, I have no plans to stop embedding tweets from X on this blog, nor do I have plans to shift to a policy of screenshotting a tweet and then posting them image. Other FPers may feel differently and may pursue a different policy. Similarly, I have no plans to stop linking to product pages on Amazon or to Washington Post articles or New York Times articles, etc. If this is a dealbreaker then be assured that I will not be personally offended if you refrain from reading my posts in the future. This decision is final (for the time being), and I will not entertain requests to reconsider. I won’t ban folks who complain about this in comment threads unless and until those complaints cross the “Am I being an asshole to someone else in their living room?” threshold at which point action will be taken.
More generally (because this also comes up as part of the same conversation) I am still on X for personal and professional reasons and have no plans to leave. Many accounts that I find important for personal and professional reasons are currently only on X, and some (most?) are quite unlikely to shift to Bluesky. Consequently, I am quite unlikely to shutter my X account. Further, I continue to post at X, albeit at a far lower rate than in the past, mostly because engagement for non-verified accounts has been broken. I believe that concerns about lending legitimacy to Elon’s project on the one hand or padding Elon’s bottom line on the other are utterly inconsequential in political and economic terms, and are easily outweighed by the prospects for (even sharply curtailed) engagement and conversation with likeminded or potentially likeminded accounts.
Further, I have no plans to leave Facebook or Instagram. I have been building personal and professional networks in both places for a long time, and do not intend to discard them lightly. There are people that I want to be connected with and that I will almost certainly lose connection with if I drop off these networks. These people include friends, colleagues, and students from across my career and personal life. I would be accepting a personally and intellectually poorer environment by abandoning those places just to spite Mark Zuckerberg, and honestly I don’t think that he even cares.
Do what you want. I haven’t chastised anyone for deleting their X or Facebook or Amazon accounts, and I don’t plan to do so in the future. I’ll confess to some concerns about the Liberal inclination to flee a jurisdiction rather than fight for it, and to abandon any space not controlled by ideologically like-minded groups, as it seems to me that a Facebook account or an X account that spends its time making efforts to organize, educate, and advocate is far more useful that an account that has gone dark. However, those reservations don’t rise to the level of calling out anyone for deleting their account. So please… do what you want. Don’t expect that I’ll do what you want.
Photo Credit: By Archives New Zealand from New Zealand – Health Poster ‘Danger don’t spread disease’, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51249911