For a long time now, Professional Contrarians™ have likened online criticism to living under a dictatorship. They’ve even compared the Woke to the Stasi. (You all need a history class or to read Wikipedia).
The topic has reached its apotheosis in the Twitter Files: Internal Twitter documents that prove, beyond a doubt, that the weird nerds who run social media have no idea how to moderate content. This scoop has been brought to you in a Tweetstorm by Matt Taibbi, who used to cover the finance industry and deaths in police custody.
The Defector has a great round-up of what it’s about and why it doesn’t matter all that much. My position is that it’s not nothing that former Twitter employees tried to suppress the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s penis and possible corruption. But also, dumb social media moderation tactics are not the Biggest Scandal of Our Time. What sucks about the whole thing is that everyone (including me, right now) is still talking about it, which reveals a certain trolly genius on Elon Musk’s part.
Anyway, intrepid investigative reporter Bari Weiss, who “reported” the story alongside Matt Taibbi, dangles this tidbit about what’s to come:
I bring it up because this gallery of ghouls has actually helped build the philosophical justification for actual oppression—not “temporarily suspended from Twitter” oppression.
Ahead of Chesa Boudin’s recall, Nellie Bowles wrote missive after missive depicting San Francisco as a dystopian Hellscape. Boudin was recalled, and everyone in prestige media decided it was the end of the reform DA movement, even as reform DAs got elected all around the nation. Still—the prevailing narrative, that criminal justice reform is politically toxic, is bound to freeze at least some potentially progressive lawmakers and reforms. This is life and death (unlike literally anything about the Twitter Files). There have been almost 20 deaths at Rikers this year. Eric Adams is nevertheless gunning for a rollback of bail reform, an effort bolstered by the false claims that Democrats lost the House because of public safety concerns.
In trying to kneecap criminal justice reform, Bowles and other writers for prestige publications depicted unhoused people suffering from addiction as zombies tearing and shitting and hurting and terrifying people in America’s once beautiful metropolises. It’s the kind of nasty depiction that public health experts and harm reduction advocates and advocates for the homeless have fought for decades, because once you dehumanize someone it’s very easy to throw away their rights and even their lives.
Which brings me to Michael Shellenberger. Adam Johnson, media critic and friend of Substance, summed it up best in response to Weiss’s Tweet:
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