(1) In this short thread I analyze the various possible meanings behind this part of Twitter's blog post on "World Leaders and Twitter." blog.twitter.com/official/en_us… 
(2) My professional background is in government policy analysis & communications work. I was literally a PR spin doctor, skilled at choosing words & phrases to portray facts in ways that best achieved a politician's goals, while minimizing legal & political risks.
(3) I chose the word "possible" meanings because the writer chooses their own meaning of a word, and readers choose one of many possible meanings of the word. Many fights would end if readers took responsibility for their own choices.
(4) "We are working to" is often corporate speak for "we have no intention of achieving this goal but we can fend off questions forever by claiming to try." 
(5) "Everything that matters" is an impossible goal & is also internally inconsistent bc people can never agree on what matters bc we are each unique. Twitter doesn't have to deliver on it anyway, bc they said "We are working to" at the start. 
(6) "We believe" is actually a good way to start just about any sentence. Beliefs =/= facts. I generally prefer to believe in things that I can support with facts, others don't. It's also fine (IMO) to believe in things you can't support with facts, if you admit that, eg faith. 
(7) "We believe" isn't used here as a way to craft the statement, though. It's used to insert a political agenda into what could be considered merely a technical platform company. Shareholders & execs are entitled to do that. Anyone else is free to critique their choice. 
(8) The second sentence reveals the company's political agenda in two ways. (a) A postmodern usage of "our society," & (b) "progress, " which has become one of the most politically loaded terms in the English language. 
(9) "Our society" wasn't the first choice I would have used to describe humanity or the subset of Twitter readers & users. I might have said "the world" or "us." IMO Twitter chose the phrase bc they disagree with the modern notion of democratic nation states. They are postmodern.
(10) I use "modern" to refer to the idea of democratic nation states that was described & recorded by the founding fathers of the USA, as a result of the Age of Enlightenment. I use "postmodern" broadly to refer to 20th century challenges to modernism. See why definitions matter?
(11) I don't believe it's productive to have a discussion or debate unless terms are defined and agreed at the start.
(12) There's many possible reasons Twitter chose "our society," but I'm trying to keep this short. Where I say "IMO," that means it's an opinion, not something I am treating as fact, so it's not really something that it's useful to argue with. We're all entitled to our opinions.
(13) "Our society" stood out to me as something Twitter would say, bc at best it wants to portray its platform as a "society" of mutual writers & readers, at worst, it views all humans as being part of one society, in the way a nation used to be described as a society.
(14) Since my own shift from political progressive to conservative, I've learned that the US founding fathers believed that our rights come from our Creator but can only be legitimized in a democratic nation state that operates under the rule of law. I can see why.
(15) IMO, citizenship means a birthright (or acquisition) of the right to elect a government that enforces the law, including an effective border. This enables a feedback loop where the governed chose those who govern over them. No borders? No country. No democracy. No law.
(16 It is abundantly clear that progressives in the US and elsewhere now disagree with this model. IMO it is clear that Twitter has a progressive agenda and promotes this in every country where the site can be read (ie every country in the world). Which it is free to do.
(17) IMO, the best way for American (or NZ) society to "make progress" is generally to treat with due respect the time honored lessons of what works well for an individual, family, community, nation state, and everything on the planet. IMO this is conservatism.
(18) IMO, the progressives' understanding of the term "progress" rests on an ideological foundation that technological advancement can be applied to every other area, meaning that what is new is intrinsically likely to work better than the status quo. Can you see the problem?
(19) If I owned Twitter, I wouldn't have introduced the term "progress" into the piece at all. As a conservative, I believe the Age of Enlightenment revealed a more accurate and effective way to look at the world than the postmodern era has. 
(20) Twitter was invented in the USA, & the company is located there. It doesn't have to use American ideas in the way it does business. There is real value in the Citizens United SCOTUS decision affirming that private companies have free speech rights. (As I understand it)
(21) An owner motivated by the ideological gains of the Age of Enlightenment would have either omitted the last two sentences of the blog piece, or rewritten it as I have in the next tweet. 
(22) If I was the owner of Twitter I'd have said: "We value free speech principles and are working to improve our performance in this area."
Which will make most of my friends reading this roar with laughter.
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Which will make most of my friends reading this roar with laughter.
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