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It seems as though several of the tweets on Trump's press secretary's [personal] account have been deleted by twitter. There's something so sad about all of th
by blhack 6y ago
It seems as though several of the tweets on Trump's press secretary's [personal] account have been deleted by twitter.
There's something so sad about all of this to me. I "grew up" on the internet where most of my peers would have been furious at twitter for this, and yet here, now, it seems like the pro-fee-speech perspective is the one that is going to get me in trouble for having.
The culture has really shifted drastically in the last 10-15 years.
Twitter could have been this incredible place where you had democratization of information. Tons of politicians and important public figures are there, and you, a normal person, can interact with them. I have my gripes with twitter, I hate the way they "tweak" the feed to optimize for rage and hatred (but I think as long as you know its there, you can ignore it), but the core idea is so cool. Unfortunately I think we're way past dead now.
The world is a worse place because of twitter. There is more hatred, more confusion, more disinformation, and more normalization of the suppression of "wrong" ideas. This is not the world that we all though we were making.
- krapp 6y ago"Democratization of information" and meaningful interaction with public figures was never the core idea of Twitter. The core idea was top-of-mind microblogging and virality over SMS. Expecting more from a platform whose core premise is limiting communication to a paragraph or two was always going to be a bad idea.
- blhack 6y agoThat's fair, I guess I don't mean twitter specifically, and the shortness of communication is one of the things I don't like. I mean that there was a time when you might dream about a place on the internet where the communication mode I'm describing here (aside from the rage-creating "tweaks" like enforced shortness), where people were freely capable of communicating and interacting with people well outside of their social strata would be normal. Twitter, with it's flaws, is that place. I routinely interact with politicians in my state on twitter. I have no idea where to do that outside of that space. But the problem is that they're going to destroy it because of this stupid, short-sighted idea that they should be in control of what people on the platform are saying.
- VectorLock 6y agoTwitter was always internally conflicted about "what Twitter is." Some wanted it to be a microblogging/AIM 'away' message transport, some wanted it to be a news outlet/media company.
- VectorLock 6y agoMaybe I'm alone in this but my personal beliefs changed from "radical free speech" around the time of the inception of Twitter to "maybe radical free speech isn't a great idea" today.
- sellyme 6y agoI've found a middle ground in "free speech is still fantastic, but perhaps we should avoid handing out megaphones to the stupidest people we can find".
- aksss 6y agoAll well and good, but going from there to being okay with the state of things as demonstrated by this clear example is a bridge too far. Not saying you’re okay with it but I think there’s a big difference between enforcing community standards for communication decency and this blatant political censorship. They don’t even try to hide it anymore.