Insights is a weekly series featuring entertainment industry veteran David Bloom. It represents an experiment of sorts in digital-age journalism and audience engagement with a focus on the intersection of entertainment and technology, an area that David has written about and thought about and been part of in various career incarnations for much of the past 25 years. David welcomes your thoughts, perspectives, calumnies, and kudos at david@tubefilter.com, or on Twitter @DavidBloom.
This past week, Twitter held a Purge. Unlike the Purges of the Jason Blum horror-movie franchise, this involved plenty of killing, but only of millions of virtual entities, of either the inactive or deeply suspicious sort that have festooned Twitter in recent years.
It was a welcome move, designed in part to demonstrate that Twitter is Getting Very Serious about election hacking this go-around. Thursday’s house-cleaning, not incidentally, comes after Twitter had already vanished another 70 million accounts across May and June. As they say in Twitterland, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
The reward for this good deed, of course, was a 1.7% in share prices on Friday, out of a Street concern that overly efficient purging would harm quarter-over-quarter user growth. No doubt left out of Wall Street’s consideration: whether it might be good for Twitter to A) not abet in the destruction of the democracy that makes Wall Street possible and B) have more real users talking about real things and fewer fake ones trying to talk the rest of us into believing them.
If there was any consolation for the idealists among us, even with Friday’s drop, Twitter’s stock is up 127% over the past year as it slowly becomes relevant to investors who finally see it as something other than a briefer, smaller and wholly inadequate Facebook.
But Twitter’s Purge got me thinking about the utility of such an approach elsewhere. Certainly, Facebook and YouTube say they’re hiring fast and laboring mightily to screen crummy content and clear off bad posts and the people/bots who post them. That’s a process on the order of Hercules’ cleaning of the Augean stables. Now if only we had a digital river to divert through this pile of horse poo.
But maybe we all should be thinking about the value of an annual purge of our own personal digital bad actors. What might be on that list? I have a few suggestions:
You get the idea. And I’m sure you can come up with plenty of suggestions for your own purge-worthy targets. In fact, let me know your favorite candidates. If I get enough good ones, maybe we can make a running list of digital Purge targets.
We also should designate an official Internet Purge Day, similar to what Twitter just did. The day they chose, July 12, actually would be a good day for it, mid-summer when no one’s in school, lots of people are on vacation and we’re all screwing around on social media too much anyway.
Then we can all devote time on that day to cleaning out all the kruft and crummy sites, the fakes, flakes, posers and overposters that we don’t need to have gumming up our digital lives. We’ll all be better for it. Just don’t send me any Facebook posts or iPhone notifications about it.
Sapnap's face is officially a snack. The Dream SMP co-founder/NRG co-owner teamed up with Walmart…
Welcome to Millionaires, where we profile creators who have recently crossed the one million follower…
TikTok's plan to challenge the new "divest-or-ban" law has encountered a setback. NetChoice, an advocacy group…
Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis are planning to tell the story of The Hunt For Gollum, but a…
After building an audience of more than 3.5 million viewers across YouTube and Twitch, Critical…
Jack Dorsey is breaking up with Bluesky. The co-founder of Twitter (now known as X) has abdicated his position on…