31 Dec 2016

I de-activated my Twitter account this morning, and here is the trigger that made me do it.

Steven Knight (aka Godless Spellchecker) noticed a Tweet from Emma Kennedy. She referred to Milo someone or other as a white supremacist. There are sources on the web calling him the white supremacists poster boy. This is not the same, and he asked for evidence. In doing so he used the dot ‘.’.  Putting this before the @ of a Twitter name meant that not only all of the Godless Spellchecker followers saw his reply, all of her 100k followers saw it too. And she did not take it well.

Two things come to mind:

1. She was not following his account.
2. He was not following her account.

Firstly, he gets in to Twitter battles which all seem to follow the same pattern. Someone says something, he asks for evidence to support what they say, and then they get angry. The two parties never end up agreeing and it can be amusing. My feeling is that someone told him about this and he jumped on it.

Secondly, she’s smart and would never have engaged in the argument if she knew what he was like. He just picked up on something, pressed a few buttons, and everything went his way. Strangely, he blocked her. I don’t know if this is before she called him a professional troll.

His point is that if you post something online at least try and be right about it. Don’t spread opinion that you feel is right. People will read it and share it. We live in the post-truth era, and we probably always have. The difference is that we have internet connections and keyboards. Thoughts go around the world almost as quickly as they come in to your head. These thoughts are published without any editorial control. This of course is a bad thing, and no-one has questioned you.

So what right has a stranger to question what another stranger says, and communicates to 1ook followers? Every right. But there are consequences for both parties.

His point here is that the people on the left (and I have every reason to think so) are not interested in debate. Arguments are shut down, and people are labelled. And when discussion is shut down, ideas are not questioned. We get angry and we don’t know why.

I’ve learned enough now. My thoughts are here where no-one is looking. That’s except for the NSA, and anyone else who accidentally trips over it.

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Correction 01 Jan 2017:

She blocked him.