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The twitter ban on 45 is a victory in some sense for the immediate but a warning in the long term, not on the curtail of free speech but as gesture towards the expansive power commercial tech has on every aspect of our governance and our lives, I don’t quite have the words but-

What I’m trying to get at, is not just that Twitter’s decision allows us to see—in ways that have been obscured—how much control they have over content moderation—

but as @Elinor_Carmi points out “platforms don’t just moderate or filter “content”; they alter what registers to us and our social groups as “social” or as “experience.”
https://t.co/GSByAOoDWg changed

I’m worried that the celebration of Twitter’s intervention on fascist rhetoric-however too little and too late- directs us to desire tech companies enforcement of liberal and democratic procedures rather than towards an investigation of

how they’ve developed computational infrastructures which exceed the power of the nation state, are hollowing out our institutions for frictionless (see removing human contact) optimization and are insufficiently described by neoliberalism
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.
This is why I'm not a critic of "cancel culture." It's crucial to impose social costs for the breech of key social norms. The lesson of overreaction is that we need to recalibrate judgment to get it right next time, not that we need a lot more bad judgment in the other direction.


Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.

It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.

Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.

It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.