“Nights” is more accurate, fights the smear that downtown is destroyed and unusable and wasn’t already shut down from Corvid the Ur-Crow, and provides a context that the actual truths of the situation can hang off of. What context does this Tweet give? It says nothing but whatever the reader already feels. Unless you’re already a celebrity, then you get to pile into the tarp under the back of the bandwagon, worm your way up with bots, and then find oneself driving said wagon. I’m not fond of the medium.
Superfluously adding “street” creates an association with poor & Black. Emphasising “night” increases the sense of menace.
It’s a headline tweak aimed at spooking white suburbanites.
Twitter culture:
Brunch.
At the time Portland demonstrators were calling out the narrative that “anarchists had taken over and destroyed Portland” rather than the fact that it was a nightly community response. The edits were a welcome response to that. That tweet was just lazy and ill-informed, fabricating complicity where, for once, there was no evidence for it. I wish people would work on the problem rather than just vapidly turn the crisis in a kind of team sports.
E.g. actual presence of mind even though Charles Mudede writes from a different city: