when your action (or in this case, inaction) reveal your value system.
[...] "Twitter would have you believe that it’s a beacon of free speech. Biz Stone would have you believe that inaction is principle. I would ask you to consider the voices that have been silenced. The voices that have disappeared from Twitter because of the hatred and the abuse. Those voices aren’t free. Those voices have been caged. Twitter has become an engine for further marginalizing the marginalized. A pretty hate machine.
Biz Stone would also believe that Twitter is being objective in its principled stance. To which I’d ask how objective it is that it constantly moves the goal posts of permissibility for its cash cow of hate. Trump’s tweets are the methane that powers the pretty hate machine. But they’re also the fuel for the bomb Twitter doesn’t yet, even now, realize it is sitting on. There’s a hell of a difference between giving Robert Pattinson dating advice and threatening a nuclear power with war. [...]
Twitter today is a cesspool of hate. A plague of frogs. Ten years ago, a group of white dudes baked the DNA of the platform without thought to harassment or abuse. They built the platform with the best of intentions. I still believe this. But they were ignorant to their own blind spots. As we all are. This is the value of diverse teams by the way. When you’re building a tool with a global reach (and who isn’t these days) your team needs to look like the world it’s trying to reach. And ten years later, the abuse has proven too much to fix.
I’ve known plenty of people who’ve worked at Twitter over the years. Most have left by now. Usually out of frustration. And their stories aren’t mine to tell, so I won’t. But I’ll tell you this: a lot of those people have tried, honestly tried to deal with the abuse on the platform. But when leadership doesn’t want something fixed it’s close to impossible to fix it. And when leadership doesn’t see something as a problem, it’s not getting fixed at all.
And I’m sure that in the next few days Jack Dorsey will come out and make a pledge about how Twitter needs to be more transparent. He’s very good at that. But when companies tell you they need to be more transparent it’s generally because they’ve been caught being transparent. You accidentally saw behind the curtain. Twitter is behaving exactly as it’s been designed to behave.Twitter, at this moment, is the sum of the choices it has made. Even when the coop is covered in chickenshit, the chickens will come home to roost.
Twitter never saw Donald Trump as a problem, because they saw him as the solution. As Upton Sinclair so eloquently put it:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
When I started writing this essay I was wondering whether to close my Twitter account. To be honest with you, all the Twitter shit was bringing me very fucking close to a mental health red flag, which is a thing I need to look out for. I still haven’t decided whether to close it or not. But I have decided that in writing all this shit down and having said my peace I can step back a little bit, at least for a little while. This isn’t about Twitter anymore. This is about something bigger. When Donald Trump tweets us into war, the bombs don’t fall inside Twitter. When Donald Trump tweets us out of the social contract, citizens who’ve never used the service are left to suffer.
What happens when the thing that might save you is also the thing that might destroy the world? What do you do? Where does your responsibility lie?
Twitter set out to change the world. It did.
via {medium}
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