MacDrifter -Twitter

I recently stumbled into a rather lengthy, personal and poignant missive from MacDrifter (aka Gabe Weatherhead) on verifying Nazis, it's hard to disagree.

My anger is partly about my own bad choices. When I read plenty of first hand accounts about Twitter as a platform for rape threats, I chose to remain as one of the counted AMUs. When I saw that Twitter had a Nazi problem, I accepted my role as being a Twitter product to sell ads against. When I saw Twitter trolls pile on innocent people because they had the nerve to be a woman with a career, I kept scrolling my timeline and churning away those engagement numbers.

That paragraph in particular struck me, as anyone that participates on Twitter is contributing to that. Could the argument be made that keeping good people around empowers Twitter to do good things? Yes, absolutely but, thus far, we are complicit in the Culture of Twitter.

I find ponderances on social networks and our changing times to be fascinating topics of discussion. I've no hard answers for the questions surrounding them but I do think, like MacDrifter, we need to be questioning our participation.