Twitter has lists. Black lists. Lists of people to be blocked en masse so that your eyes need never again see anything these blacklisted twitters write. Whether MRAs or feminists, SJWs or racists, there will be lists.

This isn’t a free speech issue. Twitter is a commercial enterprise, and can provide its service any way it pleases.  Presumably, it is doing so in response to demands by its customers, and that’s what commercial enterprises do.  No one has stepped on your First Amendment rights. You have no right to enjoy Twitter’s services.

The justification was horrible twits threatening rape and harm, abusive twits, stalkers, and indeed, there was some of that. When particularly controversial issues arose, so too did the volume of offensive twits. And make no mistake, some were extremely, inexplicably offensive.

The concern now is that people will be placed on these black lists for having opinions that differ with those who invoke the black lists.  So feminists will never again have to read a thought they deem misogynistic?  So what?  If that’s how they want to exist, it’s their right. Indeed, they never had to read any twit that displeased them before, and they are just as entitled not to read them now that they have a more effective tool to prevent ideas from ever reaching their eyes.

Of course, if people avail themselves of these black lists to shut out the sight of undesired ideas, they will be the poorer for it.  They will lose those people who they would not have put on the list, but some particularly delicate flower found too painful to bear.  They will exist only in the echo chamber of confirmation, where they will suffer the delusion that the entire world agrees with them because it’s the only world they see.

If that’s the world they demand, so be it.  If they prefer to exist only in an echo chamber, they can enjoy the one Twitter has offered them.

There is a good chance, however, that the world of Twitter will get boring, tedious if it begins and ends with only those who sing with you in the choir.  Yes, yes, Twitter can give rise to annoyances, interlopers in discussions throwing ridiculous twits to disrupt developing ideas.  It’s rife with smug demands from random twitterers demanding you respond to them, and do so their way.  And now!

So social media, the same stuff that allows for fun and interesting times for shut-ins and digital natives, can be a royal pain in the ass.  Again, so what?

Will this be the death of Twitter?  I don’t think so. I suspect the most twitterers will find the black lists too restricting, too constraining, too boring. They will relish in the privacy of their own personal Twitter for a while, then realize that hanging around with no one with a thought that challenges them is, well, a bore. And they will flee the lists and risk the annoyance of other people’s thoughts.

The alternative possibility is that within the groups hiding behind Twitter blacklists, minute differences will become the distinction between beloved members of the choir and hated members.  People who take any issue with the orthodoxy will be banished via black list to the purgatory of ideas.  Oh, such fun will follow the internal bickering, then fighting, then bloodbath of the last remaining heretics.  The only shame is that outsiders won’t get to watch as the last high priestess sacrifices the last true believer.

Then, life on twitter will return to normal.  Or as normal as Twitter ever was, with its petty annoyances and occasional outrageously offensive nutjobs who will type horrible words into their keyboard.  In the “olden” days of the interwebz, the posse would have just run the miscreant out of town for behaving so poorly. But those days are gone, now that prissy overseers have sucked the life out of the wild west of the net, and so we have black lists instead.

And if you disagree with me, I will put you on a black list so you can never hurt my feelings again.