#internuts

        I’m not sure how to feel about it. The site exists in the capacity to shame racists for being horrible and ignorant. At first glance, it feels like frontier justice served up piping hot. Disliking racists is safe. It’s easy. It's like watching Indiana Jones punch Nazis. Nazis have it coming. Upon further inspection however, “Hello there, Racists” inadvertently raises some interesting issues about twitter and social media as whole.

        About half of the twitter accounts featured in “Hello there, Racists” belong to minors. This begs the question: Should twitter have an age restriction? Currently it doesn't  As it stands, these kids who, by law, are not fully responsible for their actions are endangering their futures by publicly announcing to the world that they are both hateful and ignorant.

        After reading many of the tweets put up on “Hello there, Racists”, it becomes clear that these kids are using twitter to communicate with their peers a la facebook. Twitter is not facebook. Twitter is vast and terrifying. Anything you tweet is instantly removed from its intended context and is put on the operating table for dissection by the entire god damned universe. There is no “what I meant was…” in twitter. Twitter has taken down celebrities and politicians alike. In most cases it’s self inflicted.** Tweets are archived in the library of congress. These kids have isbn codes attached to their juvenile gaffes.

       Videogames and movies, on the other hand, do have age restrictions. Whether this is more for the purposes of protecting kids or avoiding lawsuits is another discussion entirely.

        Don’t get me wrong. Bigots are stupid, smelly jerks. Simply put, they are why we can’t have nice thing. For example, while the United States was fighting a civil war over “States Rights to own slaves”, London was busy making a subway system. The London Underground opened in 1863. Read that again. What I am trying to say is that we should have hoverboards by now but we don’t. Thanks a lot, Jefferson Davis! 

        At this point you are asking yourself: Why don’t these kids just make their twitter accounts private? Well, Mom, I will tell you. I think it’s the same reason why many people from my generation didn't make their livejournals private. Giving everyone access to your thoughts appeals to the ego. The only difference is that livejournals were kept in a dusty corner of the internet's attic. You had to go looking for them. Also, there are spiders in the attic. Twitter’s hashtag system has changed all of that.

Further reading: Mapping racist tweets in response to President Obama's Re-election

* Fjords.