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I feel like Twitter exposes — like almost wants other people to find out things about you. I don’t know how to phrase that, but the fact that people can see your likes, fact that it’ll recommend you what your friends have liked, your followers, what people you are following have liked, like, on your feed unless you specifically turn that off.

 

Just the default seems to be, like, share, share, share. And that’s not something that — again, I’m a very private person. Especially in, like, this quarantine year with a specific increase of public awareness of a lot of, like, politics and stuff, I’ve been trying not to go on all the time and check it all the time. I think it’s definitely a very easy platform to spiral down.

 

Discord pisses me off because you can’t — there’s no way to delete, or mass delete, things that you’ve said. I don’t like the idea of, in a public place, once my account is deleted, all my messages would stay. I don’t like the idea — and this is because I have a very particular sense of paranoia — but I don’t like the idea of someone being able to know what I said. And then for me to have no way to check what that was. And not that, like, I think I’ve said any bad things or anything. It’s just the idea that someone else has access to information about me that I myself don’t even have, because I would have deleted my account, that rubs me the wrong way.

 

I just want to add something — just because I remembered. The part where you talked about social media and, like, seeing things that you don’t want to see randomly, that one thing I have been thinking about a lot is how, because ... my parents are immigrants, I’m brown, and, like, that cultural identity has affected me a lot but also a lot of online sources can be very white. And I feel like that’s impacted the way that I sort of interact with my queerness, especially at first, when I was younger.

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Like, I don’t really have a sense of queer history beyond what I’ve learned online. I don’t have, like, older queer people in my life, for the most part, that I can interact with. And part of me kind of wants that. And so, and the reason I bring that up is because I feel like there’s a lot of discourses, I guess, online, about being queer and queer identities and what have you, there’s so many, I literally could not name them all. And I feel like a big contribution to that is that a lot of things that seem unresolved are questions that have already been answered, but, like, in history by other queer people. I feel like a lot of younger LGBTQ people — especially ones who were

able to come into their identity on the Internet, and find a space there to be in their identity, I mean in a way they can’t be be in real life — I feel like there’s a lot of history that we are all missing.

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I don’t want to be like, ‘it’s hard to find’ — sure, if you, like, Google stuff, there is definitely some stuff that exists, but I feel like some things need to be experienced or, like, read in proper books, as well as — like, I don’t want to prioritize one over the other. I just feel like there’s a lot of history that, because it’s not stuff you would learn in school, it’s more of a ‘you get it if you seek it out.’ And even then, like, what you get is variable depending on what’s been lost, and

what has been digitized. And I feel like there’s a definite loss that I can feel especially with respect to not having a history of, like, queer brown people, specifically in the U.S.

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