Hm. Have to say I'm deeply uncomfortable with the practice of digging into a person's follows and likes to make judgments about their social or political views. For various professional and personal reasons I follow folks I disagree with. I *like* tweets I would never retweet.

If someone were to make assumptions about me based on whom I follow and what tweets I like, they'd certainly get a lot wrong. Not everyone uses Twitter in the same way.

(You're... you're looking through my likes right now, aren't you?)

you'd have to wade through so many cat pictures to look at my likes. haha

Your Twitter avi is obviously a misdirection.

i'm that kind of coyote that does NOT eat cats.

I'm looking through my likes.

Only for rodents.

you'll need a court order to stop me

Not looking. Who you follow is none of my biz. If a person I follow or I witness something questionable, I question the person who posted it. Doesn't mean there can't be respectful conversation. Too many assholes in the world. I don't want to be more of one than I already am.

Thanks, Ryan. How are you feeling?

Pretty rough. Tylenol isn't working. Dizzy but still hungry. Moody. Tired. Sore. My therapist is very kindly & forgivingly earning their dollar via text at the moment lol

Oof. I'm sorry to hear that. You've had a rough stretch! Hope you feel better soon.

Thank you. I will pull through and am likely just being whimpy.

You've been through a lot lately. Toughness is overrated. Take care of yourself!

Thank you. I need to be better by Sunday as I have an errand on the Island that day and am giving a guest lecture Monday.

😬

I follow many accounts I disagree with politically. Lately, I’ve been using likes for stuff I actually like, but it’s also a virtual nod in a convo. So gah. Long-time twitter users still use it to bookmark.

Right. Sometimes it means "Please let me out of this conversation!"

Never occurred to me to follow ppl whose opinions I don't like! Twitter is useless to me except as a buffet of interesting ideas & current news. I follow ppl who either create or curate what seems good to me. I tried sanitizing my feed for professional purposes -- SO BORING!!

Some accounts I've felt professionally pressured to follow but I've muted immediately. Point being that not everyone uses Twitter the same way & there can be some unseen power dynamics & nuances. Someone just looking through likes & follows may draw the wrong conclusions.

I totally get what you mean. It just came as a sudden revelation to me that people can use Twitter differently. It's kind of cool to think about.

No, no. How could you think that? There are way too many of them. It was keeping me from doing things I'd prefer to get done.

Similar thoughts troubled me late into the night last night. Add a call to blacklist said person, and it reeks of McCarthyism.

I do look, but it's more to see that they are actively posting, liking, reposting, and responding. (Please note the #seriescomma that I begrudgingly used.) I mostly want to see if there are original posts. These seem to be people with whom I have a chance of interacting.

That being said, there is a level of "Trump is the best thing to happen to America EVER!!!!" that I do try to avoid.

but do you really love pictures of my pets

Unconditionally 😁

🥰

I had someone unfollow me because they used an app to find connections to accounts they disapproved of, and I was apparently following one. I didn’t even interact with the account they found objectionable. Foolishness.

On the plus side: They considerately saved you from believing they were they sort of person you might take seriously.

On one hand, yes, but on the other, nuance. We don't know that person's story, either. They may be trying to protect themselves from trauma in an imprecise way. I know anti-oppression leaders who have to use block lists to ward off trolls. Lists are imperfect but all they have.

Good point. I suppose that, whatever particular heuristics we use, we all accept a lot of false-positives when it comes to making our Twitters manageable, which is perfectly ok.

There are some trends on Twitter that are just baffling to me. I've whined about it elsewhere, but I've run into accounts which have an automatic blocker if you unfollow them. Just... why?

Did you see that HR software that searched through people's likes and flagged any tweets with "negative" words present? Dystopic!

Yep. After that article I gave up on ever being employed anywhere. 😬

As much as I detested Marketing, I have to say I always despised HR more.

(Possibly sensitive)

Just "flagging" words shouldn't be a problem. I assume the flagged tweets will be read and evaluated in context by a real human being, just the same as the recommendations of grammar-checking software are. Oh.

I won't like tweets I outright disagree with, but I'll sometimes like tweets on other topics from those posters. It's unrealistic to vet every account a person likes or follows and to expect them to have exactly the same beliefs as you do. However, there are some dealbreakers.

I only learned today what the implications are of this kind of "unfollow or else" thinking.

Can you enlighten me?

I too am deeply uncomfortable. An account of a person I don't know in real life (one that doesn't even include the person's real name) DM'd me screenshots of someone's likes (this is someone I do know in real life, someone who does use her real name and whose work I respect) (#1)

and threatened publicly to block (or worse) me and anyone else who tagged the very person they were discussing. Here is my thinking on this matter: (1) I support human rights of all kinds. (2) Based on my real-life interactions with the person in question, I strongly suspect (#2)

that that person does, too. (3) I do not expect everyone to agree with every single thing I believe about how to support human rights of all kinds, and disagreement among people with good intentions does not equal malevolence. (4) I will not participate in a mob; I choose (#3)

to act as an individual. (5) In this flurry of messages and posts, I have not seen one actual word of the person in question on the topic in question. Truth does not come to us through sloppy research and sloppy critical thinking. (6) People are complicated, lives are (#4)

complicated, and ideas are complicated. You cannot sum up a person by cherrypicking a handful of Twitter likes going back years and deciding on the basis of that what kind of human being a person is. Doesn't every single one of us deserve better than that? (7) I do not do (#5)

things online that I would not have the courage to do in real life. (8) Online threats and moblike behavior can lead to dangerous outcomes in real life. (9) We are all imperfect and come to our views through a tiny slice of a wildly diverse array of global experiences (#6)

that we ideally expand through reading, thinking, and interacting with others. (10) What Iva said: people use Twitter differently. Many people around the world follow the US president while simultaneously despising him. (11) I will not participate in what feels like an (#7)

attempt to destroy someone's reputation based on a screenshot of scattered and out-of-context likes and follows. (12) Dialogue with actual human beings in real life is always going to be better than this; it builds genuine understanding and promotes empathy. (13) I am leery (#8)

of hidden identities on social media, and especially leery of people who take actions like this while not communicating in their authentic voice under their own name. (14) Reducing people to labels is dangerous, reductive, and its own form of bigotry. (15) If I write a (#9)

person's bio one day, it surely won't be based on their Twitter likes. (#10)

I very much agree.