Yeah like I said, I'm having a hard time drawing an analogy from that to maintaining a personal blog about a hobby you like or whatever.

Okay, I'll break the analogy down for you, since you are having a hard time:

Part one: You, me, the writer (any human being)

Part two: Existing in a public space (to be found via Google or or noticed in Twitter or making stuff on Etsy or showing things on Instagram or just being photographed in person)

Part three: Self-expression of any form (writing something that will be found "colonial," or a blog, or making a hand gesture, cracking one's knuckles, or standing there with an uncomfortable smile, or even knitting (https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...) in that public space

Part four: Negative consequence for that self-expression ("cancelled," getting fired, the usual death threats, "screaming, hats first into the wood chipper") from ... people who have never even met you, who found that self-expression in the public space.

Cardinal Richelieu: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

It's the revolutionary spirit of the times. These incidents occur. You may not be aware of them, but others are aware of them, and they have what is known as a chilling effect.

Haha, if websites like that that are where you're getting your news from, I can see why you're terrified all the time! I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. I'll choose to take the risk and keep blogging about grapes :)

I'm sorry, are you suggesting that these things didn't happen? Because that is the only translation I have of "getting your news from."

Is the idea that the NBC San Diego branch just ... made this up? That the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d70h) fabricated this wholesale? Let's just click through some of those hyperlinks in the Unherd thing. https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col... sure seems to have happened; take care to note "I've offended many people with this post, and for that I am deeply sorry. Please read my comment here. And 01.12 Please read my follow-up about what’s wrong with this post here."

These are all things that have occurred in "reality" and the "real world," to use your diction. You can now ignore them -- feel free! -- but pretending that they didn't happen is, I don't know, a performance only for yourself, because I cannot unsee what has been seen.

I am not terrified; as above, I pointed out that the potential negatives outweigh the possible benefits at this point. It's a simple analysis. You have elected not to factor those real world events into your analysis.

I'm not saying they don't happen, what I'm saying is if you immerse yourself in a constant stream of "here's a bad thing that happened to one person out of the dozens of millions of people who created content on the Internet today", you'll get a really distorted view of what's actually happening. It's like never leaving your house because you see shootings and murder reports every day on local news. You're missing out on a whole lot because of the distorted view that kind of information diet gives you.

This is the sad part.

If your news diet is consumed by negative press and sad stories, they become more readily available[0] to you and can affect your decisions adversely by making you think that the base rate of such bad events are more common than they really are[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy