Twitter is a beautiful powerful medium. It brings people all over the world together and allow them to state their opinion give them a platform to express themselves. It is the first generation of politicians, celebrities,… that can by pass the subjective traditional written media and allow them to interact directly with the people.
Of course this screams for abuse and it is not that strange that twitter has to apply some form of rules to be legal and to have a platform where free speech rules. Adult posts are flagged as adult so children can see explicit content by accident but still allow consenting adults to express them selves.
Accounts are verified and get a blue tag so you see that it is an official account and not a fake account. Abusive accounts are reported and banned from the platform. You would think that is a good thing to do. But being banned on a social platform has great social implication. You loose the connection to your audience you are being expelled. This was in the middle ages one of the worst sentences you could get.
We as a society are evolved and have a legal system in place. Where you can state your case by yourself or by a person that speaks for you. If for some reason you think you didn’t get a fair trail there is always the possibilities to appeal. When you are guilty as charge you sit our your sentence and you are welcomed back into society.
Twitter is for some reason still in the middle ages. Where they expel you without a fair trail, not eve a good reason. Just a statement that you didn’t follow the rules. There is not even a good way to appeal and to rules are made that all power lays with the platform. Completely forgetting the impact it has on the person they banned.
Saying hey, it is our platform you follow our rules is the school example of power abuse. As soon as people are involved you can’t say that anymore. It is like at the start of the industrial revolution when workers where abused and underpaid. They also said, hey you don’t have to work for us, you can leave. But it is not that simple sex workers adopted twitter from the very beginning and have a big deal in where the platform is now. It is part of how they make a living so it is a big deal.
The workers of the industrial revolution didn’t do nothing, they organized themselves into unions. They gained so much power that the work conditions had to change in the more equal playing field we have now. This needs to happen with social media. The first sings we saw with Facebook where for the first time they kept accounted for how they treated their users.
It is time that Twitter gets new social rules. They have to come down from their ivory tower and install a legal like system where user have rights and can defend their case. Twitter is not almighty it is here to serve the needs of the people and by doing that it can make money with commercials.
Twitter get your priorities right or one day the revolution will start and the power of the people will win. VIVA LA REVOLUTION!
