This week, Twitter locked, suspended, or terminated the accounts of at least 10 prominent users. All affected accounts, as far as I’m aware, were critical of contemporary society and attacked it from the right. They included a fringe continental philosopher, a YouTube pundit, and six leaders of an influential Twitter clique known as frogtwitter.
Despite journalists breathless attempts to label frogtwitter as neo-Nazi, white supremacist, anti-democracy, Alt-Right, and “NRx,” it’s in reality just a small group of young, vaguely right-wing intellectuals interested in critiquing Western life. They aren’t all white (not even close), nor are they all American. It has an internal list serve, internal communications, and recognized leaders who offer their critiques through tweets and organize via DMs. It’s not a mass fascist movement, it has nothing to do with Richard Spencer, and most traditional conservatives either hate it or don’t understand it. It’s opposed by an equally intellectual and anti-PC group, the Dirtbag Left, though the two sides often share the same ideas and memes. That is, until one side was banned.
The banning of these irreverent and largely apolitical (and hilarious) accounts indicates that Twitter has shifted into a new phase. No longer content merely to silence influential pro-Trump and alt-right voices, Twitter now seems intent on stamping out any form of intellectual edginess. Political bias has mutated into a war on challenging ideas, even if those ideas are expressed in a non-abusive, Terms of Service-compliant way.
By the new rules of the game, if Socrates, Shakespeare, or Orwell lived today, they would all be - to varying degrees - unwelcome on Twitter.
It's a shame, really, because the authors of the banned accounts have clearly put a great deal of time and effort into crafting their tweets, many of which are absolute classics of the medium. To the extent that art can live on twitter, these anonymous posters are artists. They will now have to find a new medium to express their creative vision.
As it happens, I am aware that Twitter is a corporation and that corporations have the right to ban anyone from their platforms for any reason. I'm not making an argument about free speech or censorship or any of that crap. I am simply pointing out, because I find it noteworthy, that the world's ninth-largest social network, with an active user base as large as the US population, seems to have decided to make itself as boring as humanly possible.
Why Twitter is doing this to itself and what this means for the future of the internet, I have no idea. But one thing seems clear, that it heralds a richly-deserved future of lingering decline and probable death for what used to be a great platform.
More on this from Anatoly Karlin.
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