> We are at a moment in time where public commitments to freedom if thought and speech ebb to a low. > There are many culprits. I blame the transition of the p

> We are at a moment in time where public commitments to freedom if thought and speech ebb to a low. > There are many culprits. I blame the transition of the public sphere from blogs to Twitter. The difference between Twitter and the old blogosphere was that the latter was primarily communities that shared background assumptions and were mostly arguing in good faith. Twitter isn’t like that. If you have lots of followers many of them will be doing so to keep tabs on communities they’re not part of. Some of them will be hate follows. So an awful lot of the Twitter experience is of constant exposure to people who hate you and your ideas and wish you harm, who argue in bad faith, are dishonest or stupid, or whose background assumptions are so different from yours that their actions cannot be distinguished from malice. Twitter is a cancer.