Thread on censorship
1) Twitter told us last night that the reason hundreds of thousands of people was removed
from the platform is because they have to confirm their phone number or email
Then those numbers would be represented in our follower count
More from Twitter
So regarding to my "bombshell"...it's perhaps a bit less dramatic than many presumed, yet it still troubles me a lot, to the point that I wondered whether I should stop posting on certain things
You see, I realized in the last few months that, by translating information and news related to one of the fastest growing spaceflight powers of the world...I inadvertently became a spreader of PRC propaganda.
And with me exactly 180 degrees away from them, I feel scared.
It actually started a few years ago - it's not hard to meet Chinese Twitter users interested in spaceflight, either those living overseas or find a way to climb over the wall. Not surprisingly, many of these S/F enthusiasts are interested in their own military too.
This steadily grew with my followers' count until the flagship Chinese spaceflight missions of 2020 (Chang'e 5 especially but also many others) brought in dozens of them liking/re-tweeting my info tweets sometimes, and similar no. of such followers every month.
I do casually check these new followers/users sometimes. To my horror, far too many of them routinely insults, attacks, mocks others who they see as "anti-China" or spread potential mis-information, even blatant attacks, that started off w/ their state media/spokesperson.
I'm going to make a bomb shell statement here around the turn of the year, something so risky that I face prospects of the Twitter account being attacked or even banned.
— Cosmic Penguin (@Cosmic_Penguin) December 31, 2020
It's about my very uneasy Twitter experience over the past 2-6 months, the worst I could ever remember.
You see, I realized in the last few months that, by translating information and news related to one of the fastest growing spaceflight powers of the world...I inadvertently became a spreader of PRC propaganda.
And with me exactly 180 degrees away from them, I feel scared.
It actually started a few years ago - it's not hard to meet Chinese Twitter users interested in spaceflight, either those living overseas or find a way to climb over the wall. Not surprisingly, many of these S/F enthusiasts are interested in their own military too.
This steadily grew with my followers' count until the flagship Chinese spaceflight missions of 2020 (Chang'e 5 especially but also many others) brought in dozens of them liking/re-tweeting my info tweets sometimes, and similar no. of such followers every month.
I do casually check these new followers/users sometimes. To my horror, far too many of them routinely insults, attacks, mocks others who they see as "anti-China" or spread potential mis-information, even blatant attacks, that started off w/ their state media/spokesperson.
This is why I'm not a critic of "cancel culture." It's crucial to impose social costs for the breech of key social norms. The lesson of overreaction is that we need to recalibrate judgment to get it right next time, not that we need a lot more bad judgment in the other direction.
Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.
It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.
Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.
It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.
Every single critic of "cancel culture" just thinks the wrong people are getting canceled. pic.twitter.com/DDIVccj8zV
— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) February 2, 2021
Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.
It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.
Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.
It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.
