Besides the obvious: Thinking how friends in Sri Lanka had told me how they begged Twitter & Facebook to act on accounts instigating ethnic cleansing but often couldn't even get any response and what a coincidence everyone acts one day after Democrats get a legislative trifecta.

But I'm a bit wary of topics outside of my expertise, you know. (No joke: someone got mad at me today for talking about politics rather than vaccines, implying I should stay in my lane and talk about the pandemic. I wanted to say *vaccines are also politics* but I digress).

Anyway, the house is on fire and we aren't going to nitpick the fire extinguisher rating or if the fire brigade buckets are the optimal size or leaky. We'll get through this one first. But getting through American fires via Calvinball doesn't solve the problem. Not even close.

Reminiscing about the numerous lectures many of us endured for years especially from Silicon Valley folks—"the answer to bad speech is more speech". Easy to say when your house isn't on fire, country on the brink of civil war or chaos, I'd try to explain. <insert repeat lecture>

One overly-tweety president and a single chaotic day later—a breeze in comparison to many countries we'd been worried about—and Mark Zuckerberg discovers the risks of Trump being able to post are "are simply too great" & Twitter realizes inspiring violence deserves permanent ban.

Anyhoo, I'm realizing that many people who followed me in the last year really don't know of my work on technology & society! (Gotta establish credentials since I always stay in my lane.) My Wired cover story on free speech/attention in the 21st century. https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-new-censorship/

Here's a MIT Technology Review article on how we went from Tahrir to Trump, and the role of social media/digital public sphere on all this. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/14/240325/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir-square-to-donald-trump/

I have first person accounts like that from around the world. Examples where Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members—community, amiright?—were openly trying to organize their murder—for being openly gay—and Facebook wouldn't even respond. https://twitter.com/anthony_siy/status/1347712081093554177

Oh, yeah. I have a book on all this. Five years old but I think it stands. I finished writing it right before Trump and right after the coup in Turkey (what is it with me and coups??). (Free Creative Commons copy: link at bottom). https://twitter.com/ProfThibodeau/status/1347712206406750208 https://www.twitterandteargas.org/ 

Oh, hey, also YouTube, too, in case it needs saying. It's amazing how well the Google/YouTube strategy of just doing stuff without waxing philosophical calvinball about it works to avoid attention to their very, very powerful platform.

Anyway, none of this is easy. Imagine how hard this is for the United States and now imagine how terribly, terribly hard it is for countries where the people have little to no influence on these platforms, and where countering institutions are much weaker to non-existent.

We're merely inheriting millions—maybe tens of millions—of people who are convinced, utterly convinced, that the vote has been stolen; a broken, divided public sphere; and a catastrophic pandemic response. And we have it *easiest* here; the companies are here.