I spend a lot of time on Twitter and I see tons of amazing dialogue and reflections. Twitter Thread of the Day is a feature on my blog where I’ll try to share one thread that was particularly interesting, smart, moving, or impactful for me.
Today’s TTOTD comes from Zeynep Tufecki, a scholar whose work I’ve admired for quite awhile. In the wake of a conservative personality’s book getting canceled and his speaking invitation at CPAC getting rescinded, Tufecki tweeted some trenchant insights about the forces that are really responsible for this. It’s not liberal outrage.
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After careful consideration is not the right word here. Folks, check out”best-sellers. Campus/free speech books do well among conservatives. https://t.co/Q0l8CGDogb
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
According to these hot-cake selling books, it’s as if the entire US higher education system is one corner of Oberlin.. But it works to sell.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
Suddenly, though, conservatives have no-platformed Milo. So that book is not going to do well. The end of “careful consideration.”
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
So, this is not about “liberal outrage”, because the entire Milo machine depends on liberal outrage, but conservative no-platforming.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
Milo was in the business of turning liberal outrage into conservative $$$; see his sheepish statement this morning to the threat to model.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
You can often tell what’s what by what people do when the threat is real. When real business in threatened. How they talk in depositions…
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
If Milo was who he pretended to be, his response to latest would be a wild-eyed statement decrying censorship. Instead, sheepish apology.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
If Milo was who he pretended to be, his response to latest would be a wild-eyed statement decrying censorship. Instead, sheepish apology.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
So the only thing Simon and Schuster “carefully considered” is sales, or lack thereof, from conservative no-platforming of Milo.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
To repeat: An urgent task is to give coherence to the public sphere via understanding how networked attention works. https://t.co/kB3hiWv3hk
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
Because stuff Milo said had been known—it just caught conservative outrage recently. Liberal outrage=$$$. Conservative outrage=book pulled.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
Milo story reminds me of a potentially apocryphal but great story about hashish dens, allegedly, during the Ottoman times.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
But I promise it’s not time for some game theory. ? Just a good rule to understand pretend stuff, and a means to modulate response.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
So the hashish den residents would argue that this was their nature, and apparently were sometimes even subsidized. But occasionally banned.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
In one case, either someone upset or a ruler started a fire in the den.. To prove that it *wasn’t* their nature to sit and smoke all day.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
All but one ran out in panic. One guy sat in the back, waiting for the flames to reach him. People shouted: “what are you doing? Get out!”
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
“Waiting for the flames to get here to light my cigarette”, he is said to have responded, and thus proving to onlookers it *was* who he was.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
A true Milo—as he projected—would leant into this. He is, after all, a victim of child abuse, as well, and I can see how it could go.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
So I hope this incident remains a clarifying example of how the attention economy & outrage industry truly works, and where the levers are.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
In the potentially apocryphal hashish den story, onlookers are said to have decided to permanently subsidize the guy waiting for the flames.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017
The rest didn’t get to sit around and smoke all day. So if Milo isn’t “Milo!”, I hope we see the game when the next one comes around. /end
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) February 20, 2017