Here’s something bizarre:
AOPA is the lobbying group for general aviation, especially piston peasants (the Gulfstreamers have NBAA). Their membership is down by about half over the past 20 years, which eviscerates their lobbying power. As the U.S. population booms via low-skill immigration (Pew), members of Congress don’t want to bother with orgs that don’t have at least 400,000 members. Why would AOPA walk away from 85,000+ followers? My comment:
LinkedIn? Isn’t someone rich enough to own an aircraft supposed to be rich enough not to have to check LinkedIn regularly? TikTok? Are you sure that AOPA HQ staff have actually met a GA pilot? Did you hire some tween girls to run AOPA social media? Or maybe I missed the Garmin avionics partnership with Taylor Swift.
TikTok shows that they have only about 38,000 followers there. Similarly, they have fewer followers on LinkedIn than they do on X (about 61,000). I guess because GA pilots are so old, they do have over 200,000 followers on Facebook. But how tough is it to post at least the bigger stories on X simultaneously with the other social media systems? Presumably it can be done automatically, even without AI.
AOPA is important because, without them, any airport too small for a Pilatus PC-24 would be closed and turned into public housing for immigrants. Also, any aircraft smaller than a Phenom 300 would be excluded from ATC services so as to ensure plenty of capacity for the elite and the airlines.
Maybe California billionaires will step in and save AOPA. Democrat thought-leader Ro Khanna says they’ll be just as rich after a 5% haircut, which of course means that they can get another 5% haircut immediately afterwards and still be just as rich, which of course sets them up for Haircut #3… By the time the wise mandarins of Sacramento are finished, California’s Falcon 8X owners will be cut back to SR22-G2 fractional and, therefore, ready to join and support AOPA.
Can someone explain this? NPR sanctimoniously departed X during the Biden administration, but they had an endless river of taxpayer money to tap into and their loyal readers presumably got a lot of joy when they heard about Elon Musk being starved of traffic and ad revenue. But the typical AOPA member isn’t a progressive Democrat aligned with AOC and Bernie Sanders. How does AOPA benefit by leaving EAA, which already has twice as many members, as the dominant GA voice on X?
In the case the original tweet is memory-holed:
Update: AOPA reversed its decision. They said that they pulled back from X because engagement had fallen. But maybe their engagement has fallen because their X posts are lame? Here’s one that has no photo. It’s just a link to a page somewhere other than X:
Is it worth the click? Maybe, but the DC-6 doesn’t have anything to do with AOPA. Very few social media users follow links. They react to what they see in front of them. Compare to this WSJ post. Most people can get what they need to know out of it without following the link.
It’s trivial to ask Grok why AOPA has been such a failure recently on X. Excerpts from Grok’s full explanation:
They post like it is still 2015. Almost every item is a magazine lede plus an aopa.org URL. On the current X ranking, an off-platform link with no image is close to invisible. A post that says “click to leave this site” does not get likes, and likes are what get the next batch of impressions. The DC-6 post is the clean example: a crowd-pleasing airplane, no picture of the airplane.
They are not in the conversation. Aviation on X is replies, quote-posts, accident threads, MOSAIC and medical fights, airport threats, and people with airplanes in the photo. AOPA does not show up on breaking general-aviation news, does not answer members, and does not quote the FAA or a member of Congress. An account that does not reply gets treated as a brochure. They also went dark for more than two months, which is enough for the ranking system to stop showing an account to its own followers.
The topics are aimed at a different feed. A large share of the summer posts were event recaps, scholarship notes, “women in aviation” features, and high-school curriculum. Those can do fine on Instagram. On X, the pilots who actually reply want regulatory substance, airplane pictures, and a named human. EAA, the same day AOPA was walking back its exit, posted a C-5 photo and a taco joke and already had more likes than most of AOPA’s July posts ever reached.
The 80% drop is real and mostly self-inflicted. X did change the rules: links are down-ranked, replies and native video are up-ranked, Premium accounts get more distribution, and dormant accounts fall out of followers’ feeds. AOPA says it tried several formats. The samples that are still up are still link dumps, occasional TikTok-shaped video, and no conversation. Other platforms growing does not mean X emptied out. The exit post proved the opposite: when they wrote something people wanted to answer, the same 85,000-follower account reached 706,000 views.
They also do not appear to be paying for a checkmark. For an association this size that is a small, fixable distribution penalty, not the main problem.
Nitter and other X instances are down. Probably some UI change or #Resisting? Lack of funding? Decided it was not worth it anymore (like 99% of cross-platform posting by companies and organizations)? Locked out of their account?
I tried to make an X account a year ago or so and the asinine account creation process stopped me. I think there were some puzzles and such which took about 10 minutes, and some were difficult (in the sense of needing to do something in a short time, or be very very precise) and it failed me twice, so I gave up. Facebook requires you to do a whole spherical video of your head to make a new account. Supposedly these stop scammers and bots, but do they?
samue, X has really become the global town square in the past year, so it might be worth trying to set up an account again (even if you have to suffer through it). It has overtaken the traditional newspapers in terms of instantaneous news and perspectives from the entire spectrum of viewpoints globally. Had it existed in its current form (free speech!) during Trump’s first term and subsequently a whole range of scams would have been outed and the world would likely be very different today.
For instance, the seditious “coup” by Obama, Hillary and the entire intelligence community against Trump (Russia Hoax) would likely have been outed as a fraud early on. Also, the COVID scam by Fauci would likely have been outed early on and prevented the disaster that befell the world, all caused by the Mengelian Fraud named Fauci. In both of these situations, the world was essentially censored by these scammers and none of the traditional media covered it. Another expample: the NYT took 17 months to confirm the veracity of what was obvious about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents from the get-go!
XTS: I absolutely agree with you. Because of the lack of censorship, X is the only place to go to find out what non-elite people think about the issues of the day. This includes, of course, people who believe stuff that very likely isn’t true! But that’s part of the value. Sometimes a mainstream media outlet will summarize what Science-deniers or Deplorables think, but NYT reporters have so little contact with these exotic species that they’re mostly guessing unless they themselves are using Grok to mine X.
Phil, agreed. Another interesting and related item: while the NYT has been the poster child for trafficking in fraudulent stories and censorship for I think more than 20 years, the WSJ had been at least mostly neutral until the past 10 years or so. However, in the past 5 years in particular, the WSJ has essentially become the “new” NYT in many respects. There is no better way to see this than to read their article comments, in which there readers are heavily censored if anyone says anything that questions the article or the prevailing “wisdom” of the newspaper. I’ve had multiple non-incendiary comments entirely deleted! It has been shocking to watch the decline of this once-great newspaper, which I have been reading since the 1980s. I’ll be cancelling my WSJ when it’s up for renewal, particularly now that you can read all these papers for free with the Bypass Paywall Clean browser extension.
@X Town Square
Why would I want to listen to calcified townies on the Interwebs? (More like X Angry Mob, anyway.) Yes, I realize X was so important in discovering Watergate — ha, ha. No, the internet is responsible for the destruction of real investigative journalism, not for making the world a shinier happier place. In the old days, I probably would have learned about the Somalian/American milking of Minnesota by sipping a cup of black coffee and reading a print paper. Without the micro-bully pulpits, our political system might even be a little more stable.
As for the AOPA, they really didn’t even say why they left TwitX. If their membership went down so substantially, even when hitting the X Pipe, maybe they don’t have enough dues to pay a person with sufficient tolerance for nausea to man their Twitter account. Social media is crack, and crack is whack.
Why does it make sense to listen to the rabble with the applied filter of New York-based elites? It can help a person predict what will happen in an election, for example. If someone had known that Hillary Clinton would lose to Donald Trump, he or she could have gotten ahead of the stock market collapse identified by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and made huge $$ with a massive short position entered a day before the 2016 election.
Here, we *should* listen the the black voice for once:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_Is_Wack
40 years gone, but the song remains the same. Has anyone else noticed how surreal Halloweeny exhibits have gotten lately? Our neighborhood has whole families of skeletons walking their skeleton dogs, with a skeleton rooster crowing.
We need less of X, less of Facebook, less of Instagram, and less of anything on the web that feeds a society increasingly susceptible to manipulation because of our shrinking attention spans.
There was a time when people were patient, when they took the time to think things through, analyze the facts, and make rational, informed decisions on-their-own. There was a time when people understood that fame was not meant for everyone, and that you couldn’t simply record yourself and expect the world to care. There was a time when people understood the value of playing the long game, that meaningful success takes patience, discipline, and hard work.
Today, X, Facebook, Instagram, and even much of the online news media have increasingly become attention feeders rather than sources of trusted information. The goal is no longer simply to inform; it is to keep us engaged, scrolling, reacting, and consuming.
The result is a society that is increasingly impatient, reactive, and easier to manipulate. Not health or sustainable.
“special interest groups are bad. Except when it’s my favorite special interest group. Then here is a detailed strategy on how they should survive and thrive.”
Anon: Without special interest groups, I think we’d already have the full Bernie/AOC plan in place here in the U.S. It’s a minority of Americans who pay non-negligible income tax so if there were no special interest groups, the majority that receives government benefits and doesn’t pay for government would dominate.
Anon: Essentially, the category of “taxpayer” is a special interest group now. That’s how progressive our system is!
Off-topic, but have you been watching what’s going on in Islamic Palestine of Peace (formerly known as France)?
Coming soon to America!
https://x.com/K_AminThaabet/status/2107542994874487012
As-salamu alaykum, as they say in Gay Paris. Without the fraternity-sorority action that Cornell undergraduates enjoy, it seems that “students” in France are in a bad mood. Nothing to do with immigrants or Islam, we’re informed by the New York Times. Grok disagrees: “The overlap with immigrant suburbs is real. … The movement did begin in the poor Paris suburbs. Seine-Saint-Denis is France’s poorest department and has a large North African and sub-Saharan origin population, and some footage and photos show teenagers of immigrant background. France does not publish ethnicity or religion of arrestees, so there is no official breakdown.”
NYT apparently can’t recognize the flags being flown are exclusively those of Hamas and other Islamic terrorists. Difficult to believe the average indigenous Frenchman has allowed their country to be invaded and taken over by Islamic terrorists and they appear to be doing absolutely nothing to end or reverse it!!
NYT is good at photo editing. The pictures show white people and no Palestinian flags. In fairness to the NYT, though, if I search for “france protests” on X right now I don’t see a lot of Palestinian flags either (a lot of not-so-white folks, though!). Changing the search to “france riots” brings up videos with the flags of the world’s most peaceful humans, however. Example: https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/2107492788937892229?s=20
Phil, the flags you see there in your video are Greenpeace flags that have been photo-edited with AI to look like those of Islamic Terrorists. The Peaceful Students there are demonstrating for the island nation of Tuvalu, whose citizens are being drowned by Climate Change.
Here is a question to ponder: If today’s France were transported back in time to 1940, when Hitler invaded it, would the West still rally together to liberate it?
George, simple answer: hopefully not. Let evil fight evil.
What I can’t figure out is who would want to invest in France right now. Given their lack of social cohesion and tendency to riot, would it make sense to build a chip fab in France? That would be $15-50+ billion at risk. Why not instead invest in a country where at least there is some agreement on basic cultural and religious values?
Behold a blog awash in AI generated information we never knew we never needed to know.