Perhaps people are anxious about tweeting because a single tweet can ruin your life?
EDIT to add: I feel like we are have seen a shift in how social media is perceived by society. It used to be an extension of the internet forum days, where there was a reasonable expectation of anonymity and an employer scouring your online persona was considered a breach of trust. But now as more and more public discourse happens online, and places like Facebook enforce using real names, that veil of perceived anonymity (even if it was an illusion at the time) has completely fallen.
There are too many examples of a forgotten offhand remark, a harmless off-color joke, or that one time you had a bad day and thought you were just venting to the handful of close friends who are the only people you think even know about your Twitter account coming back many years later to bite you in the ass when a future potential employer (or goodness forbid the media) decide to go spelunking in your personal social media and essentially treat that version of you from 11 years ago as the same person you are today.
Twitter makes it way too hard to mass delete old tweets or otherwise exercise fine control over whats on there.
With social media, the only way to win is not to play.
The last warning I needed was one time >10 years ago while listening to a song I really liked I just posted one of the lines from the song on facebook.
A friend of mine saw it and assumed it was a commentary on a political event that had happened that day (it wasn't) and assumed that it meant I held a certain political opinion because of this (I didn't) and then was suspicious of my claims that posting the song lyric meant nothing more than i was enjoying the song and felt like sharing.
Since then I always assume anything I reveal online will be taken out of context and held against me, if not immediately, some day...
Nothing good has ever come from someone digging up old edgy tweets.
"I don't think like that any more, that's why I deleted the tweet" is a good defence IMO.
But I think about deleting my account every day, because it's an enormous risk for normal people.
the long searchable record is certainly convenient for digging dirt, but public speech is public speech.
A tweet is really more like submitting an article to a publication of record with your name and face attached to it. But, the ease with which twitter allows people to post makes it seem more like an ephemeral conversation. Anyone who has been burned by a stupid joke tweet from 10 years ago learned that lesson the hard way.
and there's the problem.
like any tool, speech is dangerous if you don't respect its power and follow some basic safety rules.
Any social media is designed to maximize engagement, so there is almost no friction between "I have a thought and I want validation for it" and hitting that submit button.
In reality, you should think of a tweet like submitting an article to the New York Times op-ed section with your full name and face attached to it. It has the potential to be there forever, and for people to judge you based on it for the rest of your professional life. So tread carefully.
as for your third point, undocumented public speech (no audio or video recordings and no effective note taking) is vastly different from creating public documents (anything on the open internet).
Yes, it exposes unapologetic racists and misogynists. That's a good thing. People who genuinely learn from their fuckups are generally called out, but their lives are hardly "ruined".
I think he's done okay for himself after his firing, but being summarily fired for supposed racism always poses a high risk of long-term negative career impact, no matter how trivial the supposed deed was that precipitated the firing - David Shor wasn't even making an edgy joke, or implying anything negative about minorities.
I’d consider something like this life ruining:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/03/29/adam-smith-c...
A mean spirited yet relatively insignificant video berating a low level employee for the company/owners bigoted views. The guy ends up losing his job and allegedly can’t get another job for years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg-jzlWcc0E
Dude outed himself as a massive shitbag, so I'm going to lean on the side of "he deserved it". What has he done to redeem himself since then? The name makes it pretty hard to search for updates.
The claim that tweets are ruining lives gets repeated over and over again, but it's a complete myth. It's a conflation of actual actual racists and nazis getting outed and ostracized, and people getting mildly called out for doing something dumb, but those are never the same people.
> in the wake of a tragedy he seemed to only care about getting blue votes
That's a baseless statement. I would argue that caring about getting votes means he cared about trying to actually help the movement capitalize on its energy at a critical moment. Right or wrong, if people can't even discuss data-driven strategies for your movement without being shamed and ostracized, your movement is dead in the water.
Who do you think was properly fired/ostracized for tweets?