rant · moment 2 of 17
Twitter's Trust and Safety Moms and the Russia Panic
from Christmas in Nantucket | The Tim Dillon Show #325 · #325
5 min
Tim describes the Twitter safety team's Stanford-educated, utopian mindset, comparing them to a drunk wine mom, and revisits the post-2016 hysteria about Russian bots controlling social media.
- Post-2016 election, the narrative shifted to Russia interfering with American elections and turning aunts and uncles into unwitting Russian assets spreading disinformation
- Tim assesses the intelligence community's two-year campaign claiming Trump was a Russian asset as an overreaction they couldn't actually prove
- Twitter's Trust and Safety staff—Stanford-educated elites—believe they're ushering in a utopia by controlling which words people can use and what information they receive
- Tech culture differs from finance: it's colder, more manipulative, run by people who genuinely believe they're saving you from your own inadequate brain
- Tech leaders want to remove people from decision-making processes entirely—voting, vaccines, everything—because they're the guardians of information
- These executives operate with a 'drunk wine mom' energy: convinced they're martyrs dealing with Nazis and trolls, deciding what their unruly children can watch and eat
- The core problem nobody admits: social media sites are just bad, easily gamed, and destructive to humanity—but admitting that kills the ad revenue
- Trying to convince social media companies to moderate themselves is like asking a crack addict to just smoke a little bit after work
FacebookRussiaTwittertech industry cultureDonald TrumpKara SwisherStanfordJoe Rogan