Manager or Meme?
26th April 2022
Restricting speech on Facebook has long been a political concern of the bright and beautiful. Twitter, though? That’s more personal. Back in its earlier days it was a bit of a hugbox — filled with Dr Who references, puns and Stephen Fry. Free speech was defended hotly, such as when a British user was prosecuted for joking that he would blow up Robin Hood Airport if it didn’t stop cancelling flights.
Yet as Twitter expanded — and especially as Brexit and Trump inched closer — darker, ruder and more dissident voices started to proliferate. The media, political and academic classes had never been faced with such hostility, or seen average schmucks exceed their status. When columnists log onto Twitter to find a bunch of random people calling them stupid, or see the opinions of a random person with a preposterous pseudonym have far more reach than theirs, it pains them less because of its real-world effects than because it wounds their egos.