TWITTER & FACEBOOK — SOCIAL MEDIA COLLIDES WITH HUMAN NATURE. At NRO, David French writes:
Our social-media companies face a series of fateful choices. If they choose to be primarily platforms for human expression, they’ll empower many millions of voices that they despise. They’ll facilitate outcomes they may loathe. If, by contrast, they choose to prioritize progressive ideology and progressive outcomes, they’ll limit their reach, their influence, and their wealth. They’ll open themselves up to aggressive competition.
What’s the lesson here? When you empower people, you find that they have their own will. When you seek to control that will, you find that they’ll rebel. The idealism of tech is dead. Human nature killed it. Nobody can have it all.
Read the whole thing, and then check out Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, who looks at Jesse Kelly’s banishment from Twitter yesterday and concludes:
The answer to this and other examples of ludicrous speech-code imposition isn’t government intervention, however. It’s recognizing that Twitter is basically a social-justice-warrior cesspool and one of the worst places for intellectual discourse possible. Even with benign management, each 280-character bite practically begs to be taken out of context by those with malice. The malignant and arrogant manner in which Dorsey and his team manage the platform make it even worse yet by pretending that all the outrage is somehow justified just because it exists at all, even if it’s nothing more than a pretense for political attacks on perceived enemies.
With that said, it’s still possible to have positive engagement on the platform, at least in the short run. If that’s of any value, stick around and stick up for those who get banned; if not, follow Instapundit’s understandable decision to depart. The biggest lesson from the social-media platforms’ onerous and one-sided interventions is that it’s still best to control your own platform in cyberspace rather than rely on the kindness of Dorseys and Zuckerbergs in the long run.
And finally, speaking of social media and human nature, at Twitchy, “Lutheran pastor’s ‘little rant’ about Twitter’s speech police is a definite must-read.”
Exit quote: “[T]he Selma-envy-riddled youngsters want to play both sides in their civil rights movement LARPing. They want to be the heroes on the right side of history. And they also want to be the guys controlling the firehoses…When people imagine Christianity to be foolish and cruel, the religions they invent to replace it are a thousand times stupider and more oppressive.”