The Censor Who Wasn't There

Thoughts on seeing who was actually doing the grunt-work of mass censorship at Twitter

I always assumed the people censoring us on Twitter would be white millennial women with an ax to grind and a head full of half-understood New Left ideology. They'd be mildly intelligent, aggressive, depressed and probably celibate. In other words, they'd be the stereotype we've convinced ourselves forms the mid-level stratum of the bureaucracy inherent to the Big-Tech/Globohomo Empire which rules the 21st Century West.

There is some truth to the stereotype, of course. All stereotypes are more truth than fiction.

On another level we project what we know or believe are the traits of our enemies onto whatever mysterious forces are enacting their will from behind a veil of secrecy and anonymity. Familiarity is comforting when thinking about those you disagree with because the disagreement is still contained within a recognizable framework. My impression of Silicon Valley was that Gen X idealists like Jack Dorsey and cynical merchants like Mark Zuckerberg ruled in slick environments surrounded by digital screens while sour white women role-played their ideology and resentment by censoring people like me.