People only like free speech when they’re losing
Can Elon Musk become Twitter’s enlightened despot?
The first time I got ratioed on Twitter, it was pretty horrible. It all took off after I was quote-tweeted by a particularly idiotic MP; for privacy sake, let’s call him ‘David L’. No, that’s too obvious, let’s say ‘D Lammy’. Some other blue ticks joined in, and it ended with people telling me they’d hope I’d be tortured. I reported a couple of very extreme tweets, but the court of Twitter rejected the cases.
It's happened a couple of times since, but there’s no need to bear a grudge because on this site you don’t have to wait that long before the bodies of your enemies float by, and all have since been ratioed and dogpiled themselves. As with inner-city gang violence, most of the people who get the worst experience from social media aren’t innocent bystanders; they’re the overproduced elite equivalents of the 18-year-old ‘talented rapper’ who, you read, ‘was no angel but didn’t deserve this’.
It's why I never join any pile-on, however ridiculous the figure, intolerant of other opinions or personally obnoxious; it’s like that old Star Trek episode where they visit an alien planet and the only punishment for anything is death, even if you literally walk on the grass where the sign says ‘do not walk on the grass’. (Or like 18th century England, where jurists often refused to give guilty verdicts, even when the suspect was obviously bang to rights, because they figured that the criminal didn’t deserve the gallows just for stealing.)