That really is a terrible personal brand.
Over at Wired, there’s a great interview with Del Harvey, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety. It provides a good look at what a difficult task it is to moderate a major social media platform. It also includes this amusing quip:
When your friend called you and told you about the Twitter job in 2008, why did she think you’d be right for it?
She said at the time, “I thought you might be a good fit for this because when I think about bad things on the internet, I think about you.” And I thought, “This is a terrible personal brand.”
After almost decade and a half, Harvey left Twitter (and tech entirely) in 2021. Since then, things have changed quite a bit, and not for the better. Most notably, Elon Musk bought Twitter (now officially known as “X formerly Twitter”), and gutted the trust and safety team. In a move absolutely everyone could possibly have seen coming, there’s been a dramatic rise in antisemitism and other bigotry on the platform.
For some time, I’ve had the notion that if it’s impossible to properly moderate a platform due to its size and scale, perhaps it shouldn’t exist at all. Like the thought that perhaps billionaires shouldn’t be permitted to exist, this idea isn’t fully fleshed out. But when we read about the difficulty of moderating Twitter, as well as countless horror stories from moderation teams for all sorts of social media, it seems reasonable to ask if more harm than good is being done by the very existence of these platforms.
On an unrelated but happier note, you can subscribe to Wired for $5 right now. I’m a sporadic Wired reader, but this article alone felt worth a couple bucks, which led me to pony up.