When people are ejected in these ways from our social networks—whether online or in our daily lives—they can genuinely seem to have disappeared, to have been muted for real. But that is very far from the truth. When someone is pushed out of progressive conversations or communities because they said or did something hurtful or ignorant, or questioned an identity orthodoxy, or got too successful too fast and was deemed due for a takedown, their absence is frequently met with celebration, as Wolf’s exile from Twitter was. But these people don’t disappear just because we can no longer see them.
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