Sadly, it is unrealistic to hope that my country will also ban Twitter. Details of the software behind an online forum make a big difference to how the forum a

Sadly, it is unrealistic to hope that my country will also ban Twitter. Details of the software behind an online forum make a big difference to how the forum affects its participants and the society they are part of. It would take a long article to begin to describe exactly how the details of Twitter are bad, but as a start we might notice how difficult it is for a reader to find the responses to a particular contribution (tweet) and how difficult it is for the writer of a response to predict which readers will see the response -- making Twitter a worse tool for arriving at collective truth than are most online fora or at least worse than most pre-social-media online fora. We might notice that (probably for complicated reasons, perhaps partly because it is a bad tool for online truth-finding) experience has revealed that Twitter is more likely to assist in the formation of an online mob than other online fora are.