Thread by @PaulbernalUK

A very short thread on the suspension of Vance - well, not on him as such, but related. I follow lots of people on here, and take glances at a whole lot more - including people I disagree with massively. I never followed Vance, but I saw his stuff regularly. 1/n

I see stuff from people I disagree with politically. I see stuff from people I disagree with morally and ethically. I follow people who detest each other and quite regularly get asked ‘why are you following X, they’re a xxxx’, in some key subject areas. 2/n

Sometimes it’s really important to listen to voices you disagree with, and to hear political views and perspectives very different from your own. I do this actively and deliberately. Sometimes, though, it’s thoroughly poisonous. 3/n

...and some things aren’t just ‘opinions’ or ‘perspectives’, they’re something much more dangerous and harmful. The stuff Vance puts out was like that. Damaging not just in theory but in practice. 4/n

It’s not about being ‘snowflakes’ or being ‘offended’ in any real way, it’s about actual harm. Is this something ‘we’ should ‘tolerate’? This is not easy at all. Who gets to decide? Who says what is ‘acceptable’? The government? The social media companies? 5/n

I wouldn’t *in general* trust governments or social media companies as far as I could throw a battleship. The ‘Online Harms White Paper’ which effectively carves up the governance of free speech between the governments and the social media companies is abysmal 6/n

*But* that doesn’t mean nothing can or should be done. If we do nothing, we get the nastiest, loudest, angriest and most manipulative people ‘winning’. So what do we do? The most important thing is to say that there’s no easy answer. 7/n

This is bloody difficult. That means treading carefully, being ready to change the way you do it - but bold enough to do things. I think suspending (and then banning) people like Vance (and Milo, Hopkins etc) before them is likely to ‘work’ in terms of ‘cleaning up’ Twitter. 8/n

...but we need to be very, very wary of where this is taking us. It’s not an easy or perfect solution.... /ends