“It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

The article title is a misquote [1] from the interviewed subject of the article, in which the subject recounts a situation where their mundane tweet was replied to thousands of times, and was trending before and after because of a Twitter feature designed to highlight high-interaction tweeets from verified accounts.

This is essentially clickbait, because it sets up an expectation in the reader that cancel culture may be involved. I have a low opinion of intentionally manipulative titles, and consider them to be a platform failure.

[1] It's literally a misquote, because the interviewed subject is in truth even more dismissive of the concept of cancel culture, but all of this is a red herring, because no one in their right mind ought to think this bizarre situation was a manifestation of cancel culture. Don't pick this apart uncharitably, my assertion does not preclude from "people in their right mind" nonetheless believing in cancel culture; my assertion is that no one in their right mind should think that This bizarre incident was a manifestation of cancel culture.

Nonetheless, the writer does have a point. The 'trending' feature was easily manipulated in the past, and now that it's been changed to add some editorial commentary, it's now complete nonsense masquerading as newsworthy happenings. But the whole site has been like that since retweets were added, where everyone is just trying to ride the coattails of being adjacent to a viral tweet and go viral themselves. Lots of people claim they get value out of Twitter, but when you listen to their example, they invariable engage in curation of their friends and the people they follow, and stick to interest-based communities rather than bored people shitposting. There's no value in Twitter-at-large, except to the trolls and people who seek fame or infamy for its own sake.

But where the writer falls short is they don't present a clear alternative. They point a laser pointer at some bizarre event that only a few thousand people know about that blowed up a blue-check person's phone for a day, conclude the whole site a cesspool, and ask us to ponder in our hearts if we deserve something better. Yes, we do, and we use those sites, like this one, and engage with those communities instead. And I think a lot of people do. Yet some people still use Twitter too, so perhaps it fulfills a genuine demand for something after all.

the specific "Her" I was referencing was the journalist that was the subject of the linked article.

I disagree with the studios' reasons for doing it (it was dressed up as a patriotic move, but was fairly thinly-veiled anti-labor action intended to disrupt the growing trend towards unionization in the entertainment industry).

But as political affiliation was not (and for pretty obvious reasons, probably should not be, California's subsequent state-level decisions notwithstanding) a protected employment class, they certainly had the right to do it. The HUAC is a different story.

(You take away the studios' right to blacklist communists and you take away their right to blacklist KKK members at the same time. It's a step I'm not personally comfortable with. And especially in the modern era, when the technology is cheaper and more decentralized, I prefer to see the solution to such things be competition to the Hollywood system instead of tying Hollywood's hands on political matters.)

I think the best content I've read on twitter are blog posts chopped up into twitter posts and reassembled on some 3rd-party viewing tool.