This is funny for now, but it's not going to be funny when demonstrating an ability to rack up likes becomes a required part of the “public outreach” component of tenure-and-promotion dossiers, which I'm estimating is about 2-5 years away. https://twitter.com/JenniferVEvans/status/1334221274135093252

In a sense we're already there, just w/ some intermediate steps that conceal what's really happening. Book contracts & other acknowledged advancement-relevant boons are handed out on the basis of social-media engagement.

Also, “research” platforms like ResearchGate and Google Scholar, which show download and page view metrics, are de facto just social-media sites like Twitter, and these metrics are already admitted as relevant to a person's case for his or her own “excellence”.

A decade from now getting caught paying a click-farm to drive up our metrics pre-tenure is going to be “the new plagiarism”.

This is also why I think it's impt for acad philosophers to resist the idea that things they do in public are “public philosophy”: this is yr institution trying to claim as its own property what you are doing as a free person.

It's the spread of work beyond its proper limits, made possible by the internet, and part of the huge transformation of labour in our era, even intellectual labour, into digital serfdom.