David Cormack
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The purge
🕑 Added 2021-01-12 21:40:25 +0000 UTCI've been seeing reports of it for a few days now. Lots of people complaining on Twitter that they've lost followers in large numbers.
I don't pay *that* much attention to my follower count (I do pay some attention as I near milestones, like X thousand), but I hadn't noticed a drop-off of followers. This morning I got a message from a friend who has quite a large number of followers asking if I'd noticed I'd lost some. They said they'd lost about 100 overnight.
I went and checked and while I'm not 100% sure, I think I've lost maybe 50?
And I'm delighted. Because those who have been deplatformed seem to be right wing lunatics.
In the last few days I've been baited a lot by RW trolls who are particularly incensed at my campaign to not allow Chris Liddell to launder his reputation.
Fuck them, fuck him.
But the thing with this purge is that it shows that Twitter has had this power/capability all along and chose not to do anything. It is only now, when Donald Trump is at his lowest ebb and about to be ejected from the White House that it has decided to move.
This is the same as all those cabinet members quitting now. Good on you for having some kind of moral line, but why now? Why not ... say when Trump implemented his kids in cages policy, or when he put in place his Muslim ban? Or any other time he's been objectively awful?
The other thing is that the ubiquity of these platforms - like Twitter and Facebook - means that those companies have a lot of power when it comes to deciding who gets heard and who doesn't. And that's a bit frightening. Because while I may celebrate all the far-right assholes being forced from Twitter, what happens if they suddenly decide that those on the left/anarchists should lose their platform?
I don't have an answer to this, because I believe that far-right assholes should be deplatformed. Go to Parler (lol), or Gab, or Voat. I don't care.
Anyway, that's all. I just had some thoughts and wanted to get them down.
Happy returning to work.
Comments
Bibijirante Sonteneguro Homesutony Kalmandole Poposu
I wonder how Ming feels about this https://archive.is/RJmiS
Stephen Cornwell
Not just Twitter, but Google, Reddit and Facebook too. Not only have they had the power to quell this all along, but it has been repeatedly brought to their attention that their platforms are radicalizing people through algorithms designed to drive continual engagement through increasingly extreme content. They've sat there pouring fuel on the fire for years, waiting until the whole house is engulfed before finally acting in any meaningful way. Zero responsibility until it's likely to have a real commercial (or regulatory) impact.
