The issue right now is how wide the surface area is. People stand up on global soapboxes, and in turn, something you say on Twitter (or said 5 or 10 years ago) comes back to bite you in places where you never even came close to saying something like that. People take snapshots of what you say and assemble them to try to make unequivocal statements about who you are as a person. And the goal is not usually to "rehabilitate" the person, offering lenience and good-faith, and questioning what they meant to say; instead, people seem to want to see bridges burnt.

There's permanence to what we say on the internet, but there's not permanence to what the culture says you are allowed to say. People are getting retroactively canceled for things that were fine at the time, which I think can be an issue. Remember how people behaved in video games as little as 5 or 10 years ago?

It's stifling, and frustrating. It makes you afraid to have a personality, but at the same time it makes having the courage to have a personality more meaningful.