Something that I’ve noticed online is the need to find shorthand for everything. That one YouTube comment that you made is your whole personality. That one Instagram like shows who you are as a person. That one Twitter follow means that you are irredeemable.
Dr. Olivia Snow, a clearly knowledgeable and thoughtful individual, seems to fall into this trap a bit too. In this interview on There Are No Girls on the Internet, she talks about how data sharing between companies is harmful, where things like DoorDash accounts for sex workers get banned despite the two things not being directly related to one another and no ToS being breached.
But then she equates blocking all people who bought blue checkmark verification on Twitter with being anti-sex-worker. While acknowledging that the intent for a lot of people is to protest Elon Musk, she uses economic disparity between him and sex workers as reasoning for why making one choice means that you have made another choice.
The problem is that she doesn’t represent it as an implicit choice (by blocking all Twitter Blue users, you accidentally harm a community), but an explicit one (by blocking all Twitter Blue users, you are purposefully harming already marginalized people because you do not care).
I’m not trying to pick on one person, but using this as an example of a larger problem of ascribing the worst possible intentions to someone because they decide that they don’t want to interact in a certain space or a certain way.
I am pro sex worker. But I deleted my Twitter account because I hate so much about the service. Those two things shouldn’t be equated as one decision. Yet on the internet, everything that we do gets flattened into something binary and immutable about our identities.
I think that it’s important to be able to moderate your own spaces. I think that it is important to be able to make decisions for yourself that are based in what serves you best, not just what you think that others want of you. It is important to give some thought to second-order consequences of your actions, but the third-order consequences are nearly impossible to anticipate.
Not every decision that you make has to speak to a part of your core self, and that’s ok. Not everybody is deserving of your time and attention, and that is ok too.
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