With the recent ousting of congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the even more visible recent banning of President Donald Trump, a lot of discourse has sprung up around Twitter. In the 21st century, dominant social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have transformed. Where they were once known for platforming grassroots movements, they have now been weaponized by bots and do-baders who seek to take advantage of the massive loudspeaker that these services provide for ill. In tandem with this, engagement on these platforms still rises astronomically, and they have now become the primary form of communication, even more popular than actually speaking to another human.
So it’s a reasonable question to ask - should social media giants have the right to censor public figures now that their influence and importance are reaching the utility-scale? I would say completely, and unequivocally, yes. And in fact, I would love to take it one step further.
It’s easy to show how conventional speaking methods, like using your mouth and throat, are rendered obsolete by social media. Many speak of the ‘put on the spot effect’, where one does not say what they mean because they are being forced to speak ‘on-the-fly’. Social media circumnavigates this entirely, allowing as much time as needed to say what you really mean to say.
Shakespeare says that brevity is the soul of wit. By forcing users to constrain the length of their posts, Twitter increases the net intelligence of all of its users.
I could go on, but it’s easy to see how web-based socializing is objectively superior to other conservative, traditionalist forms of socializing. And given this single point of truth, I believe it is not a leap to say that Twitter should be able to censor us not just on their platform, but in real life.
If I go on Twitter and tweet something stupid, then Twitter will ban me. I see no problem with that, and neither should you if you’re a sane American. Thus, it baffles me that we have allowed people to speak with their meat flaps as freely as we have, for as long as we have. Twitter representatives should be able to jump on stage at congressional hearings, and selectively discard whatever statements or personnel they deem unfit for their platform.
I believe it is perfectly rational for Twitter to monitor my real-life speech just like they would digitally. If someone says something that conflicts with a Twitter admins views, I would suggest a two-strike system. First, a red dot appears on their forehead as a warning. If they continue to speak in a non-social-media-giant-approved way, they are publicly and expeditiously executed.
All in all, I think that discussion that has arisen given the recent banning of MTG is an amazing thing, and I just want to make sure that I, an engineer in San Francisco, am steering that conversation in the right direction.
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