People frustrated with the negative sides of Twitter sometimes ask me what they can do about it. Here's a thread with some ideas.

Whether you have 100 followers or a million, you can do something to help… 📢

1) Don't share the ugly stuff, not even to expose its ugliness, if it’s just powerless fools looking for attention. (If you just can’t help yourself, use a screenshot, never a link or RT.)
Do expose the ugly stuff from elected officials and others with power. Frame your tweets to be clear you are calling it out. And use a screenshot, not a link or RT, so you don’t send them any clicks of encouragement.
2) Don’t repeat the framing of the hate-mongers. If someone says, “all Ruritanians are terrorists”, do not reply, “no, Ruritanians are not terrorists”, because all you’re doing is repeating the connection between the word, “Ruritanian”, and “terrorist”.
3) Never share links to hateful headlines & clickbait fishing for outrage clicks. Don’t be a sucker. (If you just can’t help yourself, call it out with a screenshot, so you don’t encourage click-seeking media outlets to deliver more of the same.)
4) Do share links to good stuff. Every time you click on a link to an article, you are casting a vote for that article (whether you actually like the article or not). Editors & media executives want clicks – they tally those votes. Always click and share links with that in mind.
Your “votes” truly matter to them. Their business model (or at least part of it) is based on clicks they can deliver for advertisers. Click on the good stuff, and get others to do the same.
Click the links to good-sounding tweets even if you don’t have time to read the whole article. This at least tells the social media people & headline writers that the right language, saying the right things, will attract clicks.
Think of clicking on links and retweeting as encouraging the behaviours (and type of language & story focus) you want to see in future.
5) Given all that, don’t just “like” things when you know you should retweet them. Don’t worry you’re tweeting too much or repeating yourself. It won’t hurt you, and you encourage more clicks for the good stuff. 👍
6) Don’t waste your time arguing with anonymous trolls. Seriously, it is never worth your time, which they are deliberately trying to waste. Go click on good stuff and RT good messages instead – that’s far more productive.
7) Block early & often. Blocking prevents trolls and propagandists from using your replies for their nonsense in future. Your replies are your space; don’t let others spread lies & hate in the spaces you control.

My guide: https://t.co/ZyLacjbELV
8) Report tweets and accounts to Twitter that are in violation of their rules, especially regarding hate speech, incitement and threats against you or others.

More from Twitter

A lot of people are trying to figure out what UCP means by putting this biblical quote out into the twitter verse at Christmas.

Many have piped up with commentary and criticized the mix of religion and politics. A convention long held in Canada.


The quote is often repeated at Christmas. “A child is born...” makes reference to the birth of Jesus. Makes sense.

But what does it mean?

Christians (and other religious observers with their religious texts) have made an art form out of interpreting what passages mean.

To those most radically devout (some might say zealously faithful), hidden divine meanings are gleaned from “correctly” reading the bible.

That’s what Dominionists believe. That god himself wrote the bible. Through inspiration of the actual authors, & only they can interpret.

And thus, the “inerrant“ bible serves as a strict road map to save ones soul.

Many devout Christians view the passage as a prophecy made centuries before the birth of Christ. A promise made by god through one of his prophets. Jews interpret the passage very differently.

The Anglican Priest is (obviously) correct about this being supersessionism, and a form of Anti-Semitism.

Troublesome as it is for a Canadian provincial govt to be tweeting out Anti-Semitic propaganda, that’s not the only meaning this passage has for Dominionist Christians.
1/ Meta thread about "Going Pro" on Twitter.

I've been a Twitter power user since 2008 or so. Long time.

I've watched it change from an impromptu conversation or watch party platform to a place for people to build their professional reputations and network.

2/ In many ways it's matured into a more effective professional platform than LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is (mostly) about collecting the professional contacts you've met.

Twitter is a place to meet new people.

That much hasn't


3/ What also hasn't changed is its power for networking.

This is particularly useful if you break out of your echo chamber and talk, build relationships with people doing tangentially related things.

You're bricklaying and with patience it pays off.


4/ What has changed is a growing population of people being *intentional* about the use of Twitter for their professional lives.

Observations on what's working for them:

5/ They "Build in public" - sharing behind the scenes perspectives on whatever it is you're doing professionally.

What do people not know about what you do?

Stick within your expertise, with focus, where people see you are an authority - that’s where you grow a following.
Today's threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Twitter's Project Blue Sky; Brazil's world-beating data breach; Evictions and utility cutoffs are covid comorbidities; "North Korea" targets infosec researchers; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/eCzogk14kg

#Pluralistic

1/


Join me this Thursday for the launch of the print edition of my 2020 book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM!

https://t.co/8Op6IEocPB

2/


Twitter's Project Blue Sky: Fix the internet, not the platforms.

https://t.co/KoZNABMJrE

3/


Brazil's world-beating data breach: More than 100% of the population doxed.

https://t.co/6tcbcX2gQ6

4/


Evictions and utility cutoffs are covid comorbidities: 143,000 covid deaths due to economic precarity.

https://t.co/pZM80W5DuR

5/

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THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)