How to understand Twitter's bad new direction.

How to understand Twitter's bad new direction.

Twitter this week made two changes: http://goo.gl/XFcSvm

These seemingly small changes indicate a big shift in direction for Twitter.

The first was a two-part change: Twitter started suspending the accounts of users who posted a video showing the execution of an American journalist, and it adopted a new policy and process for handling requests from people who ask to have images of deceased family members removed from Twitter.

The second is that Twitter now adds tweets to users' timelines from people they don't follow. The posts are selected by Twitter for their popularity.

These aren't just isolated changes, but an entirely new direction for Twitter. And that direction is toward Facebook, even as Facebook pulls away in the same direction. 

It makes me wonder whether instead of social media being a place for exploring and understanding other people and the world, it instead becomes a dumbed-down information equivalent of "soma" in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" -- the place where we go to forget all our troubles and get distracted by frivolity.

Marketers know that happy people spend more money. It seems like we're headed for a world in which social media sites are increasingly happy and nonthreatening places -- places that present people with a highly sanitized, sugar-coated view of the world.

Don't worry about all those horrible things going on in the world -- just focus on your bread and circuses and buy, buy, buy! Be a consumer, not a citizen.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9250598/How_to_understand_Twitter_s_bad_new_direction