October 30 Other person: I’m hoping the changes are few. But I also recognize that as an old white guy, I haven’t seen the trolls that others already experience regularly. If it gets worse for my friends, I’ll follow where they lead. Me: Yeah, I haven't had a terrible time with trolls either. My concerns about twitter changing are mostly about the societal effects. If a lot of people leave or it gets noticeably worse I'll probably leave too; otherwise, eh, I'm lazy.

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   Andrew Perfors (andyperfors@aus.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Dec-2022 16:59:46 JST Andrew Perfors

   in reply to

   @ct_bergstrom You are exactly right: it's a complete mistake to assume that the only harms of speech are felt by people who see the speech.

   What so many people don't get is even people who aren't on twitter or social media at all are affected by the stochastic terrorism it inspires and the misinfo it spreads. The people working at Boston Children's Hospital, which had to shut down because of terrorist threats provoked by the twitter account LibsOfTikTok, are a great example of the former; all of the people who died preventable deaths from covid are an example of the latter.

   I remember when Elon took over twitter I tweeted about how terrible it would be, and people said I could just block a bunch and I'd be fine. But that wasn't the point: I wasn't worried about myself, I was worried about the integrity of the information system. See example tweet below.

   Anyway, I wish I'd been wrong to worry :(