“It started as X, but then turned into Y.” Twitter started out as an engineering company that created a platform that then turned into something else. Of course it did. The whole point of creating a platform was to then attract people who will interact with each other using the platform. So they turned into a social media company. Now they have to attract and retain users, maintain and improve the platform and find a way to make money. Your product is not the platform, it’s the users, so you make money through selling user data and through advertising. Now you need a marketing department, human resources, customer retention, etc. You’re also a public company so you need accounting and investor relations. You’re platform and customer data is valuable, so you need data security, too. Oh and what are the laws regarding operating a social media company? What data can you gather? How long can you keep it? What are your obligations when it comes to security? Can people from England or Germany join your platform? What are the laws in those countries? You need a legal department.
And then comes the inevitable: assholes, trollies and bad actors. People use the platform to pretend to be other people or companies, offer products or services that are illegal, threaten others, or use language that a large majority of people find objectionable (racist, homophobic, misogynistic, etc.). Most people don’t want to hang out in the town square if it includes people who a very vocal about how Hitler was right about the jooz, or threaten women with rape. And no company wants to advertise there if there’s a chance their brand will be tarnished by the bad actors. Every social media site ever has reached the point (including Parler and Truth Social) where they know it can’t just be a free-for-all. There have to be rules, there has to be a system for reporting bad behavior and people who decide which posts violate policy and delete posts and suspend or delete accounts. It’s your platform and you can decide who can and can’t use it without violating the First Amendment, which has nothing to with who is allowed to say what on social media platform run by a corporation.
With the tagline “valley boy syndrome”, I was thinking “uncanny valley” because Shapiro look like an android approximation of a real live boy. I’m not sure if I was wrong upon watching the video.
It’s a way to appear distinctive and individualistic next to all the men in dark suits with bland neckties, without actually challenging (small-c) conservative dress etiquette.
The killer combination used to be bowtie and pipe, but, you know, with all that woke anti-smoking propaganda…
See also:
WROOT (n.)
A short little berk who thinks that by pulling on his pipe and gazing shrewdly at you he will give the impression that he is infinitely wise and 5 ft 11 in.
… partly it’s that America’s political vocabularly is now entirely in code
Progressives called themselves liberals to get through the Red Scares and then liberal became a bad word somehow and meanwhile centrist means conservative and conservative means culture-war conspiracy terrorist
Perhaps a lead box for some sort of Schrodinger experiment… but I can’t for the life of me imagine anyone volunteering to be the ‘observer’ that opens the box!
