Comment by remon
5 days ago
Well, sure, if you're exceptionally picky about non-normative use cases you can probably find a use for it that is not harmful to the average person. But you're doing a lot of heavy lifting already to justify a positive use case (contacting a person you apparently have no other way of reaching, which isn't in the top 3 of primary use cases for X). Anyway, I was speaking in the aggregate. X (so, post Elon) has been bad for society as a whole and if that's not an objective statement then it is at least close enough to make no difference. I suspect any arguments to use it anyway probably boil down "but...I like it". And since we live in a free world that's a good enough argument to have. It is not, however, harmless.
There is of course a connection between individual and aggregate effects (consider voting) and certainly the aggregate effects have been very bad lately.
But I think it's bad for your mental health to lose perspective about it. It all adds up, but it's 99.999% other people doing the adding, and unless you're in the right position to use leverage, you are mostly an observer of national and global events.
This means that morally, you don't need to feel responsible for big stuff like that - unless you see a way to end up in a position where you have that kind of leverage.
Using big, negative events as justification to scold random nearby individuals is mostly just making your local community more unpleasant.
Example: I do encourage people to vote, but I'm not going to worry about one voter more or less.