Every aspect of interacting with the various institutions that monitored and managed my kids—ACS, the foster care agency, Medicaid clinics—produced new data streams. Diagnoses, whether an appointment was rescheduled, notes on the kids’ appearance and behavior, and my perceived compliance with the clinician’s directives were gathered and circulated through a series of state and municipal data warehouses. And this data was being used as input by machine learning models automating service allocation or claiming to predict the likelihood of child abuse.

The dominant narrative about child welfare is that it is a benevolent system that cares for the most vulnerable. The way data is correlated and named reflects this assumption. But this process of meaning making is highly subjective and contingent. Similar to the term “artificial intelligence,” the altruistic veneer of “child welfare system” is highly effective marketing rather than a description of a concrete set of functions with a mission gone awry.

Child welfare is actually family policing. What AFST presents as the objective determinations of a de-biased system operating above the lowly prejudices of human caseworkers are just technical translations of long-standing convictions about Black pathology. Further, the process of data extraction and analysis produce truths that justify the broader child welfare apparatus of which it is a part.

As the scholar Dorothy Roberts explains in her 2022 book Torn Apart, an astonishing 53 percent of all Black families in the United States have been investigated by family policing agencies.

The kids were contractually the property of New York State and I was just an instrument through which they could supervise their property. In fact, foster parents are the only category of parents legally obligated to open the door to a police officer or a child protective services agent without a warrant. When a foster parent “opens their home” to go through the set of legal processes to become certified to take a foster child, their entire household is subject to policing and surveillance.

Not a single one was surprised about the false allegations. What they were uniformly shocked about was that the kids hadn’t been snatched up. While what happened to us might seem shocking to middle-class readers, for family policing it is the weather. (Black theorist Christina Sharpe describes antiblackness as climate.)

This is all build-up to my proposal for what Musk — or any other bidder for Twitter, for that matter — ought to do with a newly private Twitter. First, Twitter’s current fully integrated model is a financial failure. Second, Twitter’s social graph is extremely valuable. Third, Twitter’s cultural impact is very large, and very controversial. Given this, Musk (who I will use as a stand-in for any future CEO of Twitter) should start by splitting Twitter into two companies. One company would be the core Twitter service, including the social graph. The other company would be all of the Twitter apps and the advertising business.

TwitterServiceCo would open up its API to any other company that might be interested in building their own client experience; each company would: Pay for the right to get access to the Twitter service and social graph. Monetize in whatever way they see fit (i.e. they could pursue a subscription model). Implement their own moderation policy. This last point would cut a whole host of Gordian Knots:

A truly open TwitterServiceCo has the potential to be a new protocol for the Internet — the notifications and identity protocol; unlike every other protocol, though, this one would be owned by a private company. That would be insanely valuable, but it is a value that will never be realized as long as Twitter is a public company led by a weak CEO and ineffective board driving an integrated business predicated on a business model that doesn’t work. Twitter’s Reluctance

The game is that every time we create a new technology, we’re creating new possibilities, new choices that didn’t exist before. Those choices themselves—even the choice to do harm—are a good, they’re a plus.

We want an economy that’s growing in the second sense: unlimited betterment, unlimited increase in wisdom, and complexity, and choices. I don’t see any limit there. We don’t want an economy that’s just getting fatter and fatter, and bigger and bigger, in terms of its size. Can we imagine such a system? That’s hard, but I don’t think it’s impossible.