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obvi twitter banned him not for his tweets, but bc they can now but they shoulda long time ago, instead of coming up dingbat standards like newsworthy. same for fb. itâs a total lack of leadership now masquerading as some sort of noble act. gimme a break.
trump didnât become a threat to democracy 13 days before he leaves the damn office or incite violence for the first time 2 days ago. it started 5 yrs ago, and every single asshole on this planet knows this.
i had anxiety attacks when he asked his supporters to kick out protestors during his 2016 campaign. i bawled my eyes out when the muslim ban happened. any of this is new? sickening.
you want kudos? none from here. the damage done wonât be undone by rearranging the deck chairs on the 11th hour.
will things get better? maybe. not without people having paid a price for it, though. not for redemption but for deterrence.
the way these platforms have been weaponized â itâs like the loose nukes in eastern europe but instead they are just a bunch of apps installed on everyoneâs phones and we canât turn em off because someone read ayn rand once
i dunno how much of âwe shouldnât stop âemâ was driven by a) âbut the engagement #sâ vs b) âmuh free speech!â vs c) fear of govt pushback â changes over time
but the real lesson is truly one of âbad applesâ â once itâs in, it grows and takes over the entire thing. we had a chance to nip this in the bud but we just looked the other way because we are bad students of history
and one more thing â a lot of the âthis is a dangerous precedentâ talk misses how much these platforms not just amplified but also shaped the message with their feedback loops and incentives.
in other words, some, if not much, of what happened because of the way these platforms were designed to reward incendiary rhetoric and conflict and engaging, emotionally loaded crap like race bait and fascism
trump himself got off of seeing his tweets on tv â sure tv networks at fault too but he also loved the engagement numbers. similarly ppl realized they could both make $ but also move people with just well targeted ads and cheap content on fb/yt
so itâs not as much as silencing thatâs going on now but also a coming to terms with the core dynamics than run through these platforms. trump shaped the social networks as much they shaped him.
there were always populists and demagogues but we also have our populists and demagogues that are native to our platforms.
