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7 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
And now, a brief thread, about how I screwed up on this platform. Badly.
I’ve been on Twitter for nearly 11 years. That is a very long time to be on one social media platform. Which means that I should know better than to join in on a social media pile on doesn’t do anything but make this place worse.
And yet, this past weekend, I did that. To someone I know and respect a whole lot. 
There were many ways I could have handled this better than contributing to a pile on that meant Seth Mandel, a conservative who has spoken more thoughtfully and more bravely than many others on issues of race and racism, got bombarded with abject nonsense for days.
For one, I could have simply not tweeted anything at all, a significantly better idea than to go full Justine Sacco on someone who I know and think extremely highly of.
I’ve apologized privately to Seth. But that doesn’t really change what I did, or the impact of what I did. Saying “hey sorry I joined in on a social media pile on and then wandered blithely away” doesn’t do anything but assuage my own conscience — which is not the real issue here
@SethAMandel didn’t deserve a giant pile on on a clear joke from someone who knows him. And yet that’s what I did. And for that, I am deeply, incredibly sorry to Seth. For lack of a better term, I fucked up, publicly. And that’s on me.
