Tangent from last boost—I've been thinking a lot about the kinds of changes I experienced this past decade in the kind of ~social media discourse that's not about tweet-pundits posturing, but discussion among ostensibly regular people.

For a really long time, I found that it was often possible to get to at least partial mutual understanding by just being relentlessly human and vulnerable with people. Like, to a startling degree. I got a lot of really interesting emails. [1/3]

That changed really sharply in 2020 when I was doing covid data comms. Taking the same approach I always had suddenly resulted in people telling me I was a child-murdering demon who should rot in prison, etc. It was incredibly unsettling, especially in the midst of mass death, and it's one of the main reasons I took my ass wholly offline as soon as I could afterward. [2/3]

What I very definitely didn't really understand at all until *this* year's research is how many of those "exchanges" I was having were almost certainly with professional operatives—and with the many, many ~regular people who were modeling their rhetoric on pro disinfo and trolling ops.

Honestly, that explanation seemed like a paranoid delusion at the time, but in hindsight is just…realism? I'm not going anywhere with this, but I'm sure thinking about it a lot.

[3/3]