On Monday night, Twitter temporarily cancelled me.
Some background: this challenge, asking people to post a movie line that fans will instantly recognize, has gone viral. Jake Tapper, one of the few cable-news hosts I can still stand, has been particularly enthusiastic about it:
(Repo Man and Tootsie, respectively.)
I wanted to join in the fun, so I responded with an unforgettable line from one of my favorite films, Tim Burton’s Ed Wood:
Posting “let’s shoot this fucker” to Twitter must have triggered the algorithm or AI or something else I don’t really understand, because when I woke up on Tuesday morning I got a message saying that I couldn’t post to Twitter for twelve hours. Apparently my humble tweet violated the site’s terms of service.
Honestly, in the greater scheme of things, it’s no big deal. If anything, Twitter has done me a favor by not letting me post something that might get me fired ten years from now. It’s the very definition of a first world problem, and I have no plans to handcuff myself to Twitter headquarters in response.
But it is a pretty good example of how hastily drafted measures to protect people’s “safety” online, by deleting racist postings, misinformation and threats, can also take out a lot of benign, inoffensive material as collateral damage. Had it not been for a bunch of Trump-crazed rednecks storming the Capitol building last month, I don’t think this tweet would have tripped any wires.
Good thing I didn’t go with this line, or I might have been kicked off Twitter for life.
Poor Jill Filipovic. She actually thought people on Twitter who say they’re in favor of reforming the justice system actually want to reform the justice system.
Anyone familiar with social media can guess how this perfectly reasonable assertion went down.
Some make the perfectly fair point that the restorative justice program offered to Cooper isn’t regularly offered to people of color, so the system is unequal.
Indeed, Filipovic herself says exactly this:
Others just come out and say they want blood:
There’s no justice like angry Twitter mob justice.
Ironically, Christian Cooper (presumably no relation), upon whom Amy Cooper called the cops, has been much more merciful than the people who are purportedly on his side:
"I think her apology is sincere," Cooper told CNN's Don Lemon Tuesday night. "I'm not sure that in that apology she recognizes that while she may not be or consider herself a racist, that particular act was definitely racist."
"And the fact that that was her recourse at that moment -- granted, it was a stressful situation, a sudden situation -- you know, maybe a moment of spectacularly poor judgment. But she went there and had this racist act that she did."
[…]
"Is she a racist? I can't answer that," Christian Cooper told Lemon Tuesday. "Only she can answer that. And I would submit probably the only way she's going to answer that is going forward. How she conducts herself and, you know, how she chooses to reflect on this situation and examine it."
In an interview with NPR, he said: "Now, should she be defined by that, you know, couple-of-seconds moment? I can't answer that. I think that's really up to her and what she does going forward."
He says he never expected the video to explode in the way it did. He said he hoped that if they both went on Lemon's show together Tuesday it would help bring a close to something that has"snowballed quite significantly."
He says he recognizes she has also probably received a significant number of messages, like he has, but urged those reaching out to remain civil.
"I am told there has been death threats and that is wholly inappropriate and abhorrent and should stop immediately," Christian Cooper said.
"I find it strange that people who were upset that ... that she tried to bring death by cop down on my head, would then turn around and try to put death threats on her head. Where is the logic in that?" he said. "Where does that make any kind of sense?"
Cooper didn’t assist with the prosecution, which leads me to wonder how they would have gotten a conviction in the first place. But good luck explaining that to the online mob. Self-righteous fury is more intoxicating than fentanyl.
If your response to the Central Park Karen getting restorative justice is something like this, I think it’s fair to say you never supported restorative justice in the first place:
Let’s get back to famous movie lines. Whoever came up with this is a genius:
A cosmic *un*consciousness? Of course. That explains everything. ;p
Darth Schwarzenegger. Someone should do the whole movies like that. ;)