Just read the new thing by @bariweiss and was disappointed to hear more about how the supposed tech "oligarchy" controls everything we say. Which she's saying...on Substack. C'mon folks. 1/

Look, I've criticized Google, Facebook, and especially Twitter for being ham-handed, biased, bad at moderating, and generally scared to death of their interns and of the woke mobs who coalesce on their own platforms. But do they actually seem to be in charge? 2/

Here is probably how @jack and Zuckerberg feel right now about what they created. 3/

Big Tech censorship? Facebook has become a cesspool of conspiracy theories, and the best defense Parler has to offer is to point to all the insurrection incitement and planning that was happening on everybody else's platform. 4/

My sense of the current Big Tech "crackdown" is that it's partly going to be politically biased overreach but is also a frantic attempt by tech execs to control the worst excesses of the vast collective Id they unwittingly unleashed. 5/

So complaining about Big Tech “censorship” seems appropriate to, say, 2015, when they were overzealously purging slightly trollish critics of feminism. It doesn’t seem like anywhere near our biggest problem today. 6/

In my experience on Facebook and on here more recently, the biggest barrier to rational discussion has not been any kind of top-down "censorship," but the individual refusal to absorb any evidence or argument that doesn't confirm your prejudices, whatever they may be. 7/

None of this was created by Big Tech and the digital era. It's as old as the hills, and it's on us, not on Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg. 8/

There's something both self-exculpatory and self-defeating in blaming it all on a few tech moguls, and imagining it's all going to be solved by...what? Some kind of regulation where nobody seems to be able to explain how it will work or how it will make anything better. 9/

I'd like to see an effort to help Big Tech do its moderation better and more fairly. But I'm not going to disparage the attempt to moderate, and I'm not going to set up Big Tech or digital technology itself as a scapegoat for our culture's poor epistemology. 10/10