OUT ON A LIMB: No, Ellie Kemper Is Not a ‘KKK Queen.’
Once somebody decides to go after you on social media, there’s nothing you can do to defend yourself. Defying the mob is framed in the press as “doubling down,” and groveling for forgiveness just emboldens your tormentors. Kafka was an amateur, man.
There’s an entire media ecosystem devoted to whipping up these fake outrages for clicks. Why go after Ellie Kemper? Why not go after Ellie Kemper. Or you, or me, or anybody. We can be cancelled at any moment, for any reason or no reason at all.
If you’ve got enough money, all you can do is hide out until the mob moves on to another target. But if you can’t afford to just disappear for days or weeks or months… shrug emoji!
That trending topic description about Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar was simply wrong. As CNN noted later in a fact-check, “Salazar did not take credit for any part of the American Rescue Plan.”
Hand-selected. Curated. False.
“We aim to uphold high standards of accuracy, impartiality and fairness in our curation,” Twitter says of their various curation efforts, to include the contextualized and mysteriously monitored trending topics.
In practice, the impartiality is rare, the fairness is rarer, and the accuracy, which should be as close to 100% as possible, can seem like an afterthought.
It is not me or Josh Hawley or Elizabeth Warren or anyone else that put Twitter in the business of deciding to allow certain racism to remain on the platform, certain presidents to not remain, or certain presidential offspring to be protected to the point of suspending entire newspapers. It’s not any of us who told Twitter they should decide what is and is not scientifically sound information about Covid, or to decide what is and is not the best takeaway from thousands of tweets accusing an actor of being a “KKK Queen.”
Twitter decided to do that. It seems like expecting them to live up to the standards they set forth for this task they set themselves to isn’t so very much to expect.
As Treacher writes, “This sort of crap generates traffic for Twitter, which is why they amplify it. They know there’s a mob with torches and pitchforks at the ready, just waiting to be pointed toward the next victim. And Jack Dorsey sits on his billions and watches what he’s done. With great power comes great irresponsibility.”