| This is pretty weak. It mentions redlining, quotes Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but then mostly argues that Twitter's filter on Trump's tweet made it spread wider, the reverse of the action they wanted, implying they did the wrong action, or that it would not work in the future, which is pretty bad logic. The tweet became more notable because Twitter has never done this before. It got reproduced because it was the first time Twitter did it, not because people wanted to read the "shocking tweet". If twitter were to do this often, or dump Trump, we'd stop talking about it again. Cf Milo. And then it ends with this whole "The internet is the new industrial revolution, and that is both good and bad" thing. Kind of like, Ben couldn't stop himself from Internet Thoughtleadership for a minute. After 4 minutes of commenting on Race in America he had to go back to musing about Platforms. I get it, you want to (and can!) tie it in to your expertise. But you just kind of failed at that. You could talk about the huge tech titans making it worse: Amazon's Ring doorbell, the $10B JEDI contract with the DoD, Facebook's extremist groups/lack of moderation, Twitter not banning Trump the first time around, the Adtech industry in general pushing surveillance everywhere it can, to gather datapoints. Or the way tech has made income inequality worse. The homogenous makeup of the tech industry. The social construction of "nerdiness" as whiteness. The tech industry (and everyone on the Internet)'s unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist approach, and only being accessible to people with money and app solutionism. But instead it ends with "I am hopeful there are fewer gatekeepers, and can therefore see racism more clearly now". Like, that's it? At least put a couple links to non-profits in the footer. Doesn't this guy make a few million $ a year from his newsletter? Donate it! |