I find it quite hard to understand what your model of social media is? From what I can understand you would see Twitter as kind of a global public space? And that it should hold all ideas/perspectives? Kind of like speech itself (anyone can literally say anything they want with their biological voice, and that Twitter is kind of like an online version of that)? And that therefore if you restrict something on there it is akin to putting tape over somebodies mouth? Thus violating a really basic freedom?
I would be curious to know if that description resonates at all with your understanding.
My sense of social media is that it’s more like the conversations I have with people in person (relatively small network of people I have some connection with), but an online version, and maybe a bit wider because of that, but I’m not intending to have a conversation with the entire world (that concept seems very odd to me).
Personally I’m extremely uninterested in “influence over popular culture” from my social media usage. I had a really nice/interesting experience on mastodon in the last few years. That’s my measure of “success”.
I think not being able to “handle” something is very normal. Having emotions, traumas, and being able to feel them is what I understand as part of the healing of those things. Like they are little signposts that there is something interesting there to work on. But that needs to be done if/when people feel safe to do so, not in a hostile environment where people are expected to just “handle” (aka repress? suppress?) that stuff.
My sense is actually people who don’t explore those parts of themselves end up very fragile, because if/when that hardened shell cracks, it’s quite a mess! (and might hurt a lot of other people). Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects says:
In owning and honoring our pain for the world, and daring to experience it, we learn the true meaning of compassion: to “suffer with.” We begin to know the immensity of our heart-mind. What had isolated us in private anguish now opens outward and delivers us into the wider reaches of our inter-existence.
Or as Kahlil Gibran said:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
What I really like about mastodon (and other fediverse stuff) is that it opens up some possibilities to create really nice caring communities - like people do in the physical world. Ones where we can relate to each other.