The chattering classes were aghast this weekend over a report Friday from Buzzfeed that Twitter was set to launch an algorithmic timeline as soon as this week.

What this would mean is that instead of the current system wherein Twitter presents tweets in chronological order, Twitter would select which tweets a user can see in their timeline, promoting some content over others, or as Buzzfeed describes it, fixing an alleged problem of signal-to-noise on the service.

The result of the alleged proposal saw #RIPTwitter emerge as a popular hashtag among users who claimed they would go as far as quitting Twitter should the changes take place.

Twitter Chief Executive Office Jack Dorsey has since written publicly that “we never planned to reorder timelines next week,” which is notable for what it lacks: Dorsey doesn’t deny that Twitter is planning to do so, simply instead confirming that the change will indeed occur, just not in the next seven days; a report from The Verge verified this with details of a user test Twitter is already undertaking of the new algorithmic timeline.

What is being missed in the whole debate, however, is exactly why Twitter is planning on screwing with its service to begin with, and it’s a point that will most particularly be lost on the millennials that run the likes of Buzzfeed and others: Twitter is going to mess with its timeline because they have become obsessed with political correctness and wants to “filter” the things they don’t like given repeated criticism from the likes of Buzzfeed and others that it doesn’t do enough to control content regarded as “hate speech,” which in 2016 isn’t anti-Semitic remarks (Jew hating is actually in at the moment among the chattering classes) but speech which doesn’t agree with their social justice warrior worldview.

A bridge too far?

Try Googling Twitter hate speech, and see what you read.

Twitter is a company that has a diversity officer because it apparently isn’t diverse enough (people of an Asian background count as being white in Silicon Valley in 2016), a company that removed a verified user badge from journalist Milo Yiannopoulos‘ account simply because they didn’t agree with his worldview, and is a company that just last month cracked down on so-called “hate speech” by defining it as among other things any speech that “intimidates” (their word) other users, which in 2016 translates to any speech that disagrees with the social justice warrior world outlook.

Instead of focusing on building the service by adding features that users have long asked for (how hard would an edit tweet option really be?), while implementing ones no one has asked for (such as Moments), Twitter has bizarrely instead become beholden to the idea that the way to stop the ship from sinking (remember, it’s currently losing users) is to pander to a small but highly vocal minority who want Twitter to be a safe space because they’re not adult enough to deal with dissenting thoughts.

Twitter was built on free speech and yet in its dying days all it seems to be doing is implementing an Orwellian fantasy of not only restricted speech, but by extension restricted thought as well.

#RIPTwitter.

Image credit: fish-gravy/Flickr/CC by 2.0