Just when you thought Twitter couldn't get any safer, they went ahead and hired someone for a position called "head of product for conversational safety." And the new hire is busy coming up with ideas to make Twitter even worse.
Somehow even for a made-up job they still managed to find someone underqualified for it.
You'd think the person in charge of what might be the most difficult task at Twitter would have a predictable skillset: years of experience in and out of academia, politics and programming; an impenetrable wall of media savvy; close ties to the exec suite. You'd be wrong.
Christine Su was Twitter's pick for the position and she is an "activist-entrepreneur" whose startup PastureMap "helped ranchers plan climate-friendly grazing practices."
And while she may not be qualified for the job, she does have something that matters much more than experience:
An intersectional power level of over 9,000.
"As a queer women of color who is an Asian American in tech in rural America, that experience is a very intersectional one. I've had plenty of experiences moving through spaces where I wanted more safety,"
And she's gonna use that experience to protect you from mean words on the internet.
If you're afraid that this is Twitter signaling a move toward even more censorship of non-Ministry-approved-ideas, you'd be dead wrong!
Twitter doesn't want to punish you for wrongthink, they just want to re-educate you!
Transformative and procedural justice are the foundation of Su's vision for a safer Twitter. The once radical concepts challenge the notion that we should just punish people who cause harm, instead offering an alternative: a pathway to repair the harm that has been done and to prevent its recurrence (transformative justice), and a set of fair rules that make harm rarer in the first place (procedural justice).
What this new Utopian version of Twitter will actually look like in terms of features is a little vague. But apparently, it will at least mean we'll get a "Sorry" button.
For Su, implementing transformative justice means building tools that create private pathways for apologies, forgiveness and deescalation.
...
Yeah, that's what's going to bring in a new age of peace and unity. Got it.
If all of this sounds a little Orwellian to you, relax. Twitter just wants what's best for the "public conversation."
"At the highest level, all of us at Twitter are deeply committed to the same mission, which is to serve the public conversation."
