Apparently this middle finger thing has touched a nerve.

I honestly didn’t intend all of this to be some free speech debate, or a discussion about why Google still doesn’t understand social. I was just mildly annoyed and found it a bit ridiculous. But these things tend to take on lives of their own. So it goes. 

Before I shut up about this and attempt to get actual work done, I did want to respond to what Tom Anderson (the artist formerly known as “MySpace Tom”) wrote. To be clear, Tom reached out to me with what he was going to write beforehand, to make sure I was cool with him posting it. I obviously was. I will never have a problem with someone disagreeing with me as long as they’re not total asshats about it — and Tom is anything but.

But I still think he’s wrong.

Tom basically argues that Google has to remove content like my middle finger image just as Facebook and Twitter and MySpace have had to throughout the years. If they don’t, “it turns into a cesspool that no one wants to visit… sorta like MySpace was,” he writes. (And how fucking awesome is it that he is willing to be that brutally honest about his former company?)