As the festive season was drawing to a close, I –like a large portion of the online population– became concerned about ending the cycle of over-eating. The sense of satiety is easy to numb and hard to get back. It is not only true for food but also for content. Non-physical items can lead to gluttony as easily as the very physical foods and beverages of Yule. Similar mechanisms are at work. Only, content doesn’t have a season. The feast is all year round.

Information overload or gluttony

“Information overload”, I hear you say, “we know that already”. Is it really the problem, though? As Clay Shirky argues in his talk “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure”, information overload is our new environment of plenty and not a problem that needs solving. We celebrate the availability of information in many great ways. Yet we experience problems with it sometimes. It lies upon us to create internal and external filters to manage our time and attention because they are our most precious resources.

Excited by the wealth of information available, we lay the traps ourselves by using the tools in an unsustainable manner. I’ve been doing it myself. At some point, I was following three hundred Tumblr accounts and around four hundred RSS feeds. Soon, I started operating under the impression that I should see every item and extract value out of them. These expectations were unreasonable and they were making me crazy. I cut more than half of my RSS feeds. I left Tumblr for a while. Only now that I have returned a wiser man, do I understand more about this information gluttony.

More and More

As humans we’re drawn towards content. There’s a drive to accumulate experience and learn about things because it helps us survive. Putting aside immediate threats, it helps us reach our other goals too. This drive, however, has a tendency to extend. Soon, we start consuming content because it might help us reach a potential goal. Our scope widens out of proportion. That’s also why we hop from entry to entry on Wikipedia and catch ourselves only four hours later. This is why people keep updating their Tumblr dashboard to see more shiny things.

Yet, if we go down this path, neophilia –the love of novelty– becomes the purpose. In the mass of indiscriminate content, true interestingness constitutes a surprise reward. As our brains try to unveil the secret pattern which leads to more such rewards, it sends us on a quest for more and more content. Infinite scrolling or infinite pagination can keep us on a site or service for hours.

Too Little Information To Decide What To Ignore

Dumb aggregation tools collect an endless chronological sequence of content items. The absence of an unread count makes it into a “river of content”. Somehow, this should be enough to change expectations and make it OK. It doesn’t always work and we get stuck on sites like Tumblr or Facebook.

Understanding what features of such content rivers cause you to slip into gluttony is key.

1. Piles make us want to get to the end…
2. but rivers of content have no edges or limits. Trying to consume all that passes on our screens is futile. So, we should know what we can safely ignore…
3. yet, rivers of content are often indiscriminate messes which make it difficult to decide what to read and what to throw out. Posts are often unstructured and stripped from categories: source and date are all we have to decide. Links on Twitter are inscrutable shortened URLs so we don’t even get that precious little indication regarding the source.

Deciding with certainty which pieces you can ignore is important for content consumers as well as curators. Design can help us with that. As publishers and designers we should ask ourselves what relevant information we can provide to help our audience decide what they should or shouldn’t read. Metadata can be richer and more relevant.

Lists and Folders

Until then, we might have to use old tools to organize our incoming streams and restrain ourselves. Lists and categories provide order and visibility. They help us decide what to pay attention to and what we can ignore. To come back to food, you have better chances to avoid picking up candy if you make a list of groceries in advance and stick to it.

Mark Zuckerberg is often quoted as saying: “Nobody wants to make lists”. Most people don’t want to, yet, some order must be imposed if we are to stop treating content like formless stuff. Lists have a long and rich history in helping us make sense of the infinite, as Umberto Eco says. What makes list-making unpopular on the web is the lack of a strong incentive.

Paper.li and Google+ both encourage their users to make lists and categories.

1. Google+ asks you to put the people you follow into circles.
2. Paper.li functions best with public Twitter user lists and, hence, provides a strong incentive to use them.

Yet, there’s something to note about categorization in Twitter lists, Google+ circles and folders in RSS readers. They categorize the sources but not the items they publish. Put a Twitter user in a list and then, regardless of what she publishes, the content is going to be in the list. Same with Google+ and most RSS feed readers. You put a feed in a category or folder and then, the items from that feed are all stuck together. There’s a general lack of granularity and an opportunity for more intelligent tools. Paper.li, however, is different. It shows the source and puts the links in categories like Technology, Business or Education automagically. The result is not perfect but –oh so– helpful. I would love to see other tools do the same.

Bearing this limitation in mind and with practice, it is possible to gain a little control back. Take a little time aside, while we’re still in the beginning of the year, to review your lists of sources and the folders/categories they’re in. It is worth doing.

Image credit: Portion depicting Gluttony in Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things”.

I wrote “Content Rivers and Information Gluttony” on the Paper.li blog, it was originally published on January 13, 2012. Reproduced here with permission.

Hier soir, j’ai appris avec tristesse la fin annoncée de ThinkUp. Anil Dash, co-fondateur de cette entreprise avec Gina Trapani a expliqué les raisons de cette fermeture sur Medium.

ThinkUp permettait de recevoir des informations sur son utilisation des réseaux sociaux sous formes de petites capsules digestes comme “Evren a utilisé des points d’exclamation dans 133 tweets au cours du mois écoulé” plutôt que sous formes de graphiques difficiles à interpréter.

Malheureusement, ce genre de service repose entièrement sur les APIs des grands réseaux sociaux. Les APIs permettent de récupérer des données depuis les réseaux sociaux pour les traiter. Les grandes entreprises qui les gèrent, font régulièrement des changements dans ces APIs — parfois pour des raisons techniques et parfois pour décourager les développeurs de créer des clients alternatifs.

Au plus beau jour de ce service, on pouvait recevoir des observations pertinentes sur notre utilisation de Twitter, Facebook et Instagram. Facebook et Instagram ont récemment fait des changements importants et assez restrictifs à leurs APIs. Twitter se prépare à en faire aussi.

Comme l’explique Anil Dash dans son billet, ces modifications entraînent des surcoûts de développement imprévisibles. Le nombre d’abonnés n’étant pas assez important pour absorber ces surcoûts et les repreneurs potentiels étant inquiets de buter sur les mêmes problèmes, le service sera arrêté le 18 juillet prochain.

Cela me pousse à me demander si on peut compter sur les APIs des géants du web. On est, au moins, obligé d’admettre qu’il faut des poches profondes pour pouvoir suivre leurs évolutions parfois brusques. Cela rend, évidemment, difficile la survie de petits projets financés par l’abonnement et qui se refuse à afficher de la pub ou vendre les données aux annonceurs. Je me réjouis de voir les co-fondateurs écrire à ce propos.

Je tiens à profiter de cette occasion pour remercier encore une fois très chaleureusement Gina Trapani et Anil Dash pour avoir créé et maintenu ThinkUp. Merci infiniment. Et bonne chance pour leurs projets futurs.

Cette annonce de fermeture me fait prendre conscience, encore une fois, à quel point il est important de sauvegarder le web ouvert et indépendant. Les technologies standardisées et ouvertes permettent, seules, l’émergence de ces projets cools. Bloguer sur nos propres sites, avoir nos propres flux RSS, … est très important pour garder ces technologies et ces usages vivants.

The Buzzfeed piece about Twitter abuse that makes the rounds since last Thursday proves to be a very interesting read. The way the abuse problem has been left to fester is infuriating. So much so that while reading I took notes. Notes laced with profanity. Here are a few thoughts.

Free speech radicalism is an easy extremist tenet to hold in many ways. First, it is often defended by people who don’t know abuse at all. They, therefore, don’t have to make any sacrifices for this radical belief of theirs. Second, it is — in theory — a steadfast policy that protects the company from liabilities. They can then say that they’re a utility and don’t make content decisions.

It stems, however, from a weird idea of free speech. Free speech is great. I wouldn’t want the government to silence me but I want to be held accountable for the shit I say. Free speech radicals seem to have another definition. To many of them, free speech as being allowed to say whatever you want, often without suffering any consequences. Allowing people to be protected from the consequences of shitty actions and shitty words is not a moral imperative. It creates a toxic environment where a few assholes can police the speech of all the others by unleashing barrages of abuse and threats. It doesn’t help foster more productive debates. Just the opposite.

Yet, once people accept something needs to be done, the search for the ‘perfect solution’ begins… This search lead to paralysis as Vivian Schiller is reported as saying in the piece. Extremists always ask for a perfect solution before letting go of their own problematic one. Always seeking to swap an extremism for another. But that’s not how the social space works, that’s not how humans function and communicate. There needs to be moderation in every sense of the word. We need kind and intelligent judgment calls and concessions. There needs to be consistency obviously but no solution will ever be perfect.

Jack Dorsey is quoted as saying “No employee should ever be in the position of having to decide, subjectively, what qualifies as free speech and what does not”. This makes me doubtful that this problem will ever be mitigated. It will always come down to human judgment whether the judgment of a moderator or the judgment of an engineer designing an algorithm. Stress cases will always arise where the meaning of free speech will need to be discussed. Putting the burden completely on the users to moderate is again non-committal safe in the sense that investors might not punish the company and it won’t unleash lawsuits but it won’t fix the problem that for a vast majority of users, being on Twitter is very tiring work, an energy drain and often even a safety concern.

Large organizations all have things they’d rather not discuss (*cough* web governance *cough*), power struggles they’d rather not address, ambiguities that are preserved even if they hurt the business because it is believed that somehow these discussions would never end and distract everyone. I firmly believe leaders should encourage these discussions nonetheless. Especially in this case.

I’ve been a part-time social media manager for a long time now. Other responsibilities and tasks have always made it hard to focus on the social media side of things. This is far from ideal. The stakes are high, opportunities to embarrass yourself and your organisation are plenty. There are opportunities to be seized and risks to be mitigated on social media platforms. To reap benefits, you have to engage. Yet, lots of managers throw social media responsibilities on people — often young people because they’re hip — as just another task in their job description.

If you’re a manager, DON’T DO THAT.

If you’ve been tasked with starting social media campaigns with little prior experience and an already full plate, there are corners you can cut and methods you can use. Remember, however, that corner-cutting always comes at a cost. As a beginner, you won’t be good right away. You should manage expectations.

Chances are, your organisation is going to social media because they want to acquire traffic. Temptations are strong to dive head first in a paid campaign and get results on the spot. You should never start with paid advertising on social media. It would be best to establish a strategy and a baseline presence. That way, you may gather a following that will be an asset for future efforts too.

Be honest and strategize

Be very honest with yourself about the time and attention you can devote to them. Open only channels you can sustain and nourish. Think hard about what you have to contribute and what your audience wants.

What will you publish, for whom, and where? These questions are the most important. Answers depend entirely on what you’re selling and your unique constraints. No shortcuts there.

Start by listening. Research your topics, find what you can provide, find people’s pain points. This will help you determine what to publish. Once you start on social media, never stop listening and adapting. Monitor answers, comments, messages and answer them.

Before you do any kind of paid advertising, publish non-self-promotion updates/links. You should be able to publish helpful or entertaining things at regular intervals. Paid campaigns can help you build a following. It will be more effective if there’s valuable content on your profiles. People will follow your profiles in larger numbers if you have a track record of enjoyable and useful content.

Listening tools

Since you’re time-constrained and/or busy, you won’t be able to gather information actively. You’ll have to rely on tools to monitor the conversation online and find links to share with your audiences.

Large organisations circulate press reviews. You should subscribe. It will give you an idea of the conversation around your organisation and, perhaps, give you links to share.

Google Alerts remains one of my most prized tools. Set up one or several of these. Relevant Google results will pour into your e-mail account. Use straight quotes and the operators AND and OR. Like so…

Be sure to play with the advanced settings (content types, language, …) until you get the best results.

Publishing tools

You should craft updates for each social network individually because each has its own culture and “traditions”. That’s the ideal. You’re time-constrained and/or busy so you may publish links and updates on several social media services at once using Hootsuite. Remain aware that updates tailored to specific networks are best. Make sure your updates work in all their contexts.

Hootsuite also makes it possible to schedule updates. Scheduling is antithetical to genuine conversation which makes it risky. Never do it more than a few days in advance. Social media should remain a conversation. When there are major world events or other ripples through your communities, you’ll have to change your plans. Remember…

• Monitor the conversation and events closely.
• Have a device that can access all your accounts and especially Hootsuite to delete/cancel updates with you at all times.
• Give a trusted colleague access to the accounts in case of an emergency.

Be ready for the traffic you buy

Acquiring loads of traffic is the dream most organisations chase on social media. Getting hits on a page with incomplete information is a waste. People will turn around and leave in an eye blink the page doesn’t answer their questions. They will leave if they feel mislead, if the page doesn’t load fast enough, if it doesn’t capture their interest… Problems with your website content can annihilate all your efforts. Best make it good before directing tons of expensive traffic to it.

Work with the people who take care of that website to iron things out. Ask yourself and them… Once they get on this page, what do you want prospects to do? What is the end goal? You can try to get as many prospects to give you their contact information and have your sales team contact them. You may want prospects to send an application through a form or place an order. Decide on a desirable outcomes and trace the steps that’ll get you there.

You should have the basics of this process (the sales funnel) figured out before launching any campaign. You’ll never get it 100% right. Be ready to keep iterating and adapting forever.

Set up your analytics right

There’s money on the line. For each paid publication or ad, you should estimate how many sales you made, how many prospects decided to contact you, etc. depending on your end goal.

Make sure the site where the traffic from the social network will land has Google Analytics enabled. Your objectives (form completions, post-sales thank you pages…) should be set as goals. Get help from the website’s developer for that. Make sure the data is *actually* collected. Require access to all relevant analytics panels to keep an eye on things.

Google Analytics makes it possible to create unique URLs to differentiate traffic sources. For each paid publication, create a unique URL and you’ll know which paid publication generated the most traffic. It will permit to accurately follow which link was clicked. You can, therefore, compare various versions of your ad and campaigns. Use the URL creation tool from Google Analytics. Everything is explained in the detailed help section.

A word of caution… You will most probably have big discrepancies between numbers from Facebook Ad Manager and from Google Analytics. This may feel weird to you and your bosses. There’s not much you can do about that. Analytics are only indications. Most marketers have to accept this as a fact of life. There are various ways to explain these differences in this Quora thread.

Take your time and let algorithms take theirs.

The more time you have to prepare and execute a campaign, the more bang you’ll get for your buck. On the contrary, the less time you’ll have to invest, the more money it is going to take to get results. With enough sharp thinking in your targeting (the criteria used to select people you want to see your ad) and enough time for the social networks’ algorithms to test and optimise your campaign, clicks, likes, comments or video play will be cheaper.

If you feel overwhelmed by these notions, you understand why this is a job ;). Being a beginner at this stuff and be put in a position in which you have to perform is stressful, I know. Don’t get discouraged though: read articles online, make mistakes and correct them, get help…

We spend more and more of our time in walled gardens owned by private companies: still love Twitter, ever ambivalent about Facebook, on LinkedIn out of obligation to HR departments everywhere, reading on Medium. Yet, I still think we should maintain independent spaces. So I blog here (albeit not regularly enough).

But. Is this important? Does it really make a difference? I use the default theme of WordPress. WordPress, even though it is open source, is heavily influenced by its parent company Automattic. It is becoming a default because it powers about a quarter of all websites and plans to conquer more. It is convenient but it is eating the web too and its open source nature isn’t enough to give me warm fuzzy feelings about it any more.

I hear the sirens of Medium.com calling. Their song is loud and melodious. 300 people follow me over there without me having published a word on the platform. When I compare these numbers with the analytics of this site, the potential seems very clear.

Am I shooting myself in the foot? If I were to make the jump, what would I publish here and what on Medium?

Because one does write to be read. Sometimes, you know, readers are nice.

I could scrap WordPress, transfer all the worthy content to a flat-files CMS like all the webdev hipsters do. Would that be roots enough to satisfy that part of me? Would it make a difference in the grand scheme of things? It might make my site faster for sure but it would do zlitch to get me more readers.

It all comes down to two questions: Is self-hosting WordPress indie web? If not, what would be? Are these concerns genuine or am I just hiding?

Technology might change and forms of communication might shift but, at its heart, social media is based on basic human impulses of sharing. Social media platforms are a space — most often extremely public — set up to share. Sharing interests. Sharing insights. Sharing questions to get answers or more interesting questions. Sharing to make friends and meet collaborators. Sharing to be a good citizen. Sharing to raise one’s profile in a group. Technical ability will always be secondary to social abilities and the beautiful impulse to share.

The internet was always social: even before it had pages to access via web browsers (like Firefox or Internet Explorer). Groups had synchronous communications via chat rooms on IRC servers and asynchronous communications via newsgroups on Usenet.

Web pages to access via browsers and interconnected with hyperlinks date back to Christmas 1990 (only!) when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working for CERN near Geneva in Switzerland, invented the web. His invention spread over the whole internet during the first half of the 1990s.

Not long after, the first blogs started appearing. “Blog” is the contraction of the words “web” and “log”. These publications are defined by their format: a series of entries in ante-chronological order. They were varied in their styles, tone and lengths. Early bloggers chronicled their discoveries on the still relatively young world wide web, they shared insights about their interests, some were diarists or journalists… People started pouring their passions in this format.

In the early days, blogging required knowledge of code and web servers. In 1999, easier to use services such as LiveJournal and Blogger.com launched. Using these services, running a blog got easier. In the following years, there was an explosion in the number of blogs. By 2004, blogs became mainstream.

Most bloggers are read by few people. Social media is, among other things, characterized by smaller readership / viewership. Mass circulation and audience metrics aren’t the point. As you may know, mass media and their pretences of objectivity are recent (and crumbling) historical phenomena. Early in the eighteenth century, opinionated publications like The Spectator (1711) and Tatler (1709) circulated in small numbers and flourished. People read and debated them in coffee shops. They wrote and published in agreement or disagreement. Vigorous debate and fecund struggles shook the public square. In many respects, early social media was a return to these days. Bloggers knew each other and published articles in reaction to other articles frequently.

In 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto. The Manifesto is a series of 95 theses insisting that the web enables global conversations between people in which the polished/cold language of organisations feel foreign. It says organisations will have to adjust and join these conversations with a genuine human voice or risk becoming irrelevant.

What the Cluetrain Manifesto observed and prophesied did happen. Online conversations influence people in big decisions such as choosing a university and a degree; or for whom to vote in elections; as well as in purchasing decisions such as choosing a refrigerator. We are more suspicious than ever when we face messages in traditional one-way channels. We base purchasing decisions more on our peers’ recommendations and on online searches.

Although blogging remains a great way to disseminate longer forms of writing, the quicker and more spontaneous sharing started happening more and more on the various social media sites which have emerged. Let us resume our little historical overview.

Social networks as we know them today with interconnected user profiles started in the late 1990s. We could go through the evolution of Friendster, the rise of MySpace, etc. It would stoke my nostalgia but it would not give you much value. If the subject interests you, there are many resources out there. Any history that I might offer would also centre around the US and/or Europe. In other regions of the world, other social networks held dominion. Suffice it to say there were many options and rapid evolution.

The most popular ones today — around here — are Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.  That’s where the party happens and everyone meets.

• Facebook is 1.71 billion monthly active users (June 30, 2016) and 14,495 employees (June 2016)
• Twitter is 313 million active users (June 2016) and 3,860 (June 2016)
• LinkedIn is 106 million active users (March 2016) and 9,732 employees (March 2016). Figures come from Wikipedia.

Yes. Absolutely. According to this tongue-in-cheek chart. No, but seriously. You absolutely should  — at least — try it.

Academic Twitter explained. Courtesy of @sylviaduckworth. pic.twitter.com/zTIHv5IptW

— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay) September 24, 2016

(Thanks, @amisamileandme for forwarding this chart to me)

At the beginning of August 2016, a Guardian article written by an anonymous PhD student attacked the use of social media for academic work. It was published under the patronising title “I’m a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer”. It sparked a healthy and very interesting debate on Twitter under the hashtag #SeriousAcademic.

Many academics in various stages of their careers wrote tweets and articles contradicting this article. They mentioned many uses of social media for their work (as well as their social life and entertainment).

One of the most interesting and complete responses I’ve seen came from Jacquelyn Gill, an ice age ecologist at the University of Maine (Thanks, @kevinmarks for bringing it to my attention). Her two-tweet response and the discussions that ensued are worth a read.

recruited faculty, gotten speaking invitations, increased citations, connected with journalists, and developed NSF-worthy broader impacts.

— Jacquelyn Gill (@JacquelynGill) August 5, 2016

Academics with blogs also reacted strongly.

Leigh Sparks (@sparks_stirling) from the Institute for Retail Studies, University of Stirling, offers My Serious Academic Use of Blogs and Twitter. This retail specialist summarizes lessons learned on the usefulness of social media to his career.

Dean Burnett (@garwboy), doctor of neuroscience, comedy writer and stand-up, parodies the original article. Doing so, he offers many links on the problems usage of social media in academia may address with I’m a non-serious academic. I make no apologies for this also on the Guardian platform. Social media provided him with alternative prospects since his field is oversubscribed.

Kevin Gannon (@TheTattooedProf), a history professor at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa offers a rebuke to the original article and deconstructs the notion of “serious academic” in I’ve Got a Serious Problem with “Serious Academics”.

Main benefits of a presence on social media for academics put forth by these articles and tweets are:

• Sharing enthusiasm and supporting each other
• Adding researchers to your network and create stronger ties which might lead to cooperation opportunities
• Exchange sources and references which may be useful for research and/or funny.
• Increase the circulation and readership of your work (books, peer-reviewed articles, blog posts, quotes in the press, etc.)
• Increase the odds journalists will contact you for stories.
• Have control of your online image and not depend on your institution’s staff web pages.
• Using it as a back-channel for conferences and other events to get noticed by participants and organisers.
• Promoting your field and providing expertise to the general public simply by inhabiting those online spaces and having your exchanges archived. For the Liberal Arts and Humanities, such a presence makes it easier to present our disciplines in a positive light outside of the frame of crisis / being set aside that has been pervasive in the media these last few years.

Social media is only a drag if you try to control too tightly. You have to find and/or define boundaries, yes. However, most academics who report seeing benefits use social media as humans first and foremost because that is how you can connect with people. That’s the charm of social media. Again, don’t take my word for it:

@biotweeps Only advice I can give: Don't take it too seriously. All the benefits I gained come from using it in a more "human" way.

— Rob O' Sullivan (@Rob0Sullivan) August 5, 2016

If you do social media like this, you’ll reap benefits and it won’t feel like yet another professional task. Putting on a mask is orders of magnitude more complicated than learn to inhabit those spaces as yourself.

There’s a range of openness, of course. It is a matter of personal style, how visible and likely you feel to attract unwanted attention from racists and misogynists.

One thing is for certain, trying to remain 100% on-brand on social media will exhaust you and make you come across as fake. You should be yourself, inhabit the online public space as best you can and try to be a good online citizen. As long as you let your passion and your expertise shine, you’re on the right track.

Done well, your online presence can be about work, show a bit of yourself and feel genuine while you maintain boundaries that seem clear and healthy to you. Clara Nellist’s Twitter feed is a great example. I follow her because particle physics is cool (and she seems nice). Although we don’t interact directly, her tweets are full of value and the occasional glimpse into her life as a postdoc makes her relatable. Tweets about her travels or some of her outside activities make it easy and fun to connect. For example, learning that she finished the 20 kilomètres de Paris and seeing her proud selfie put a smile on my face.

The more human you are the easier it will be to make genuine connections with other humans. That’s why it’s called social networking. You can find out all about this approach in Stephanie Booth’s one-hour talk entitled “Be Your Best Offline Self Online“. (She helps people get started and manage their online presence in one-to-one and one-to-many workshops. She’s nice and very knowledgeable. I met her through her blog.)

If you feel motivated to start on social media, I would advise you to start with Twitter: Messages are short, it is public by default, there is very little to misunderstand.

The London School of Economics and Political Science published “Five minutes with Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson: “Blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now” on their IMPACT blog all the way back in 2012.

They also have a Twitter Guide that may be a bit dated as it is from 2011. More importantly though, they have a list of Twitter users active in the Humanities and Arts for you to follow.

Yesterday, a Twitter employee made the account of Donald Trump disappear for 11 minutes. Twitter’s reaction showed the world how fucked up the company still remains. The incident and their response was a welcome moment of respite in a very long and strenuous nightmare.

Earlier today @realdonaldtrump’s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee. The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored. We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.

— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017

Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day. We are conducting a full internal review. https://t.co/mlarOgiaRF

— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017

Of course, if Twitter’s community rules were anything more than cosmetic, he would’ve been kicked and banned long ago. Threatening nuclear annihilation on an entire nation, for example, is definitely against the rules. We’ve known for a long time that rules don’t apply evenly on Twitter. Bots, literal nazis, white supremacists and harassers benefit from their lax application everyday.

Another funny way they trampled their own policies was when they acknowledged it, as Sarah Jeong remarked.

I just realized the funniest part of this thing…..

I thought they didn’t comment on individual accounts for privacy and security reasons https://t.co/wtdCwePMja

— women in general (@sarahjeong) November 3, 2017

No doubt, they are flattered that the President of the US uses the platform so actively to keep in touch with his supporters, threaten his enemies in clear violation of their terms of service and pass the time during his bouts of insomnia.

The incident also points to something very peculiar and concerning. Twitter, like all the centralized hegemonic platforms of the day, can’t decide what it wants to be.

The fact that social media platforms are amorphous and yet incredibly impactful allows their managers to take themselves seriously in the worst possible ways. Twitter exec’s freespeech and growth above-all approach doomed the platform to become a toxic wasteway. They should’ve listened when Ariel Waldman brought attention to the escalating harassment on Twitter in 2008. But they weren’t interested in sound community and product management and design — apparently. These things seem trivial when you’re busy re-engineering a new free-speech utopia and raking-in cash in the process.

They completely lost their minds during the Arab spring. People using their products on Tahrir Square in 2011 and the credit that the media gave them inflated their egos. It cemented their belief that giving everyone a voice unfettered by social conventions or fear of consequences was a politically powerful thing and, in their Silicon Valley arrogance, they didn’t pause to think; they soldiered on. Charlie Warzel’s infamous Buzzfeed piece about Twitter’s abuse problem shows this beautifully.

How nothing of what happened in between 2011 and last year’s US election didn’t make them change course is beyond me. It is now clear that, at least, some measure of Russian meddling was involved in the election through social media. Silicon Valley companies, under scrutiny from US Congress and the threat of losing the public’s trust forever, are forced into introspective journeys. Whether it’s for show or earnestly is still unclear. Articles that come out these days are concerning. It appears Twitter, for example, was so obsessed with growth that it slowed down the spam team on purpose and allowed Russian and Ukrainian bots to remain on the platform. Ah!

Our 11 minutes of freedom from Donald Trump’s Twitter and how the company chose to respond shows Twitter hasn’t learned a thing. Is the world going to crumble if the President can’t tweet about nuclear war and/or TV ratings in the Palace at 4am?

It won’t. He and his ilk should be banned. The ideas of free-speech without consequences and growth at all cost should be uprooted from the Valley. Plain and simple. Bots, nazis, white supremacists and harassers should be kicked and banned with full force — IP addresses, device fingerprinting, the technical abilities exist if engineers get on the case.

In the early days of the internet, etiquette was important and you could be banned from IRC channels, forums… for offenses that today would be considered mild. It would sting, you would learn how to behave and move to other IRC servers or forums. Decentralization allowed that. Now Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn see themselves as all-encompassing platforms. But they aren’t the internet and they shouldn’t strive to be. Banning these bad actors is not such a big deal and it is the right thing to do. I know a bot…

Photo credit: Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904). Animation based on 8 photographs from plate 658 of Animal locomotion.