This reminds me of something I noticed in this article. There's a sort of temporality that is attributed to Twitter - it's seen as a platform that exists 'in the moment'. Despite the fact that when you post something on Facebook it goes public just as quickly as it does on Twitter, Facebook lacks the sense of immediate community temporality that Twitter prides itself on.

This is also important to remember. It's common to see Twitter snippets even in the mainstream media these days, and it's easy to forget the importance of context. Tweets are by their nature short and concise - a lot needs to be inserted between the lines. Many tweets read bare and excluded from context can be drastically different in their contextualized forms.

I think it's also important to keep this in mind. Twitter is not representative of the total population. Some people use social media more than others - there's a definite generation gap - and some people don't use social media at all, regardless of generation.

I wonder how this would sound to someone with an interest in surveillance studies. Would Twitter have been popular if it had been transplanted in our society 50 years ago? Or are more modern audiences more amenable and tolerant of surveillance practices?

What are the ethical consequences of this mechanism? It seems social media is becoming increasingly like an echo chamber, which might explain why politics, for instance, are growing increasingly polarized. It seems increasingly rare for groups on the internet to confront different opinions directly - people gravitate towards groups who agree with them, and without any outside forces to challenge them, it becomes easy to be misled and indoctrinated (anti-vaxx, for instance). Do tech companies have a responsibility to minimize this influence?

What do we make of this? Is it more important to archive everything or is it better to archive the right thing? As practical as it is to delete spam, where do we see this sort of censorship going in the future?

How do we design technologies to be used by everyone? Is doing so even possible, or can we only aim for 'good enough'?

It's interesting that stepping away from social media can be seen as a 'surrender'. If being pressured off a media platform means letting the 'bad guys' win, what does that say for those who never get on social media in the first place? Is there a growing social responsibility to create a social media account to be a voice of reason online? What happens to those who don't, or can't?