Twitter to Further Infantilize Users by Warning Them They're About to Engage in Heated Debate

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Twitter has a bad habit of treating its users like children, idiots, or both. Its coastal hubris shines through with every update, and it looks like it’s going to get even worse with its latest one.

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According to Protocol.com, Twitter announced on Wednesday that it will add a feature that will warn users that they’re about to get into a “heated” or “intense” conversation before they send a tweet to someone currently engaged. They’re calling it a “work in progress” while they learn “how to better support healthy conversation.”

AP/Reuters Feed Library

How will this work? They don’t know yet. First, they have to define what a healthy conversation looks like according to Protocol:

Twitter did not specify in this case how it will determine whether conversations or posts could qualify as either heated or intense, and how it will evaluate the success of the test. “This is the first exploration into more context about a conversation’s vibes, so you can be informed before you join. This is a small limited experiment on iOS and Android and we will be learning and iterating as we monitor the results of the initial experiment,” a Twitter spokesperson wrote in a statement to Protocol.

Why is this a problem?

What Twitter considers “healthy conversation” would undoubtedly disclude any kind of facts or inconvenient truths put forward by conservatives. Users are already gifted innumerable tools to rule out certain kinds of conversations on their personal feeds. What could very well end up happening is that you or your conversations could end up being muted further if your conversation becomes “too heated.” If you’re blacklisted or shadowbanned already (as I am) it would further allow Twitter to tighten down on how much you’re seen.

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More than that, it’s further developing us into a society of people who become aghast at simple disagreement, which seems to be the goal. The idea that someone could take an opposing view, specifically of a leftist view, is becoming more and more taboo. It’s even getting to a point where one can’t disagree openly in public at a school board meeting without the Justice Department getting involved.

We’re becoming a nation of children.

More egregious is the fact that Twitter is assisting us in becoming less a nation of ideas and more a nation of isolation. Ironic that it’s a social media platform that allows people all over the world to communicate with each other being used to facilitate and amplify only one kind of voice.

Heated debates are necessary for the health of a nation and the growth of ideas, but it would seem the left and its many denizens in Silicon Valley would like to keep us in some form of arrested development.

Expect this kind of further censorship to become a trend across many other platforms.

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