*I have a lot of unpopular opinions. One of them is that Twitter is actually pretty good. Follow people who say interesting stuff, block assholes, and carry on. My world is definitely bigger, personally, professionally, intellectually, than it would be without Twitter. Today's big news is that Elon Musk is threatening to buy Twitter, and take it private.
Understandably, this news has shook has some people who don't like or trust Grimes' baby daddy, including me. The whole deal, however, does raise some interesting points about public vs private, and what they mean in various contexts. Twitter is a private company, as in not part of the state, that is publicly held, in that there are shares that anyone can buy, and own a piece of Twitter. But the difference between publicly traded and privately held is different from the difference between public and private. For the most part, roads are a public good, and maintained by the government through tax dollars. Private companies manufacture the cars that drive on them. An auto manufacturer could be privately held, or publicly traded. in any case, Elon's statement is kind of wild:
I am having a hard time reading this other than "y'all should trust me, Elon Musk, personally to regulate speech on one of the largest social media platforms in the world." Which, yikes. Given Twitter's status as a de facto public utility, I'd rather see it become an actual public entity.
That said, even absent Musk's machinations, I am a little bit worried about Twitter. We've seen a general gentrification of the Internet over the last decade or so, which might not be a bad thing, though I do miss the hyperfocused Tumblrs of things like naked people reading books. In that context, I am a little concerned about what looks like Twitter's effort to get us to play nice.
If you tell someone who needs to get fucked to go get fucked, Twitter now asks you to think twice. It's unsettling on one level as a reminder of the AI content moderation that's happening to anything you post. What bothers me more is how "Most Tweeters don't post replies like this" posits some kind of social norm that is a fantasy. This is very idiosyncratic, but it reminds me of this notorious image.
In a similar vein, Twitter has also introduced something it calls "downvotes." We've asked for a "dislike" button on various social media platforms for years, but this ain't it. For lack of a better word, it's a snitch button. If you "see a reply that isn't adding to the conversation," you can let "us" know by downvoting. Who is this us? Well, "your downvotes are not visible to the poster, or other folks in the conversation," but Twitter uses them to prioritize higher quality content for you - and everyone on Twitter."
It's hard not to read this as "if you say unpopular shit on Twitter, you will be more or less shadowbanned." For instance, I imagine that until recently, more than a few Domers would have downvoted me for reminding them that Brian Kelly killed a kid. You may or may not feel like that's important information for me to be able to share, but it does point to another aspect of internet culture -- the tendency of many social media users to treat anyone who disagrees with them as a "troll." There are any number of ways you might define trolls -- from harmless sports BS to folks who drive others to suicide, but the idea that someone w/ a different point of view lives under a bridge automatically is kissing cousins to the idea that the responses to a bad Tweet constitute a mob. As we consider in a variety of ways what kinds of speech are or are not tantamount to violence, it's important to think real hard about how we think about speech we don't like.
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