Whether or not one is an active user of the social media platform Twitter, its phenomena are newsworthy because its constant feed of refreshing comment has become the chosen platform of those making media.
This week, this precise point was made in the Washington Post under the headline: “Twitter is the crystal meth of newsrooms.”
Veteran journalist David Von Drehle opined that in a short-attention span news cycle driven by a need for hot takes and immediate comment, the Twitter addiction of the press corps entailed a “widespread failure of political journalism”. “Too many of us covered Twitter’s reaction to Trump, instead of covering the ideas and impulses of the voters he was reaching,” writes Von Drehle, “Trump stoked the addiction by fuelling Twitter with red meat and steroids.”
To consider the latest barrage of unhinged presidential tweeting is to witness both red meat gone the way of Trump steaks and steroids’ inevitable shrinkage effect on the ardor.
It’s hard to imagine a time when “WITCH HUNT!” was inconceivable as a world leader’s press release, just as it’s difficult to remember a time in which trolls were just fairytale creatures who lived under bridges, not the uglier, crueler monsters who use Twitter to harass those people who dare enjoy something they do not. Like a Captain Marvel movie. Or a Ghostbusters reboot. Or a freakin’ Gillette ad. You don’t have to be a female journalist to live in the thundering rivers of Twitter hell – though it helps. You just have to be literally anyone in a political argument.
Between Von Drehle’s excoriation and Ginger Gorman’s “skin-removing” book Troll Hunting – about the social-media-abuse experience, also released this week – one might be left wondering if the “microblogging” site was more damage than brand these days. Last July, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman announced her departure from Twitter, claiming “the viciousness, toxic partisan anger and intellectual dishonesty are at all-time highs”. She was not the first; the celebrity exodus is seemingly perpetual. A Google search for “the death of Twitter” returns 200 million hits.
And yet, for all the trolls and Trumps and madness, if Twitter’s dead, the vampire’s popular. In December 2017, there were 3 million active monthly users of the site in Australia. In December 2018 there were 4.7 million. In America, there are 67 million users … and Haberman, once more, is one of them.
I’m one of the harassed subjects of Gorman’s book, yet I’m still on Twitter, too. It’s not because the habit is so meth-like I can’t live without it. It’s because rather than drown in the screaming Twitter madness Haberman describes, I decided just to cut myself a break.
Because Twitter isn’t just a “conversation”, as per the company slogan; it’s a 12-year-old continent inhabited entirely by recent arrivals, with a culture that’s subtle, unexplained and in rapid evolution. There are 326 million Twitter users who’ve moved into this borderless parallel world, sharing content to and from contexts and perspectives entirely foreign or unknown to their experience.
Learning the protocols of a new community is onerous for anyone. Studies show it takes people up to a year to familiarise themselves with the rhythms and relationships of a new workplace – one in which they are immersed daily. Relocate an individual to an entirely new external community, and the anxiety, anger, impulsivity, irritability and helplessness of culture shock results from unfamiliarity with social cues and rules.
Isolate participants even further – divorced from human speech and gesture – and gather those dislocated identities into the abstracted landscape of the internet, and you have Twitter. What looks like English here is several versions of it spoken simultaneously, all community boundaries collapsed; LOL, on fleek, gronp, noob, lewks, glowup, can haz, incel, MRA, snowflake, MAGA, auspol … When one considers that a third of a billion people have plunged into this churning confusion in an historical blink’s blink, “the viciousness” becomes much easier to understand: Twitter is barbarian country.
So I’ve asserted the borders of my own Twitter republic by learning to love the block button. It wasn’t as easy as it should have been. Girls are socialised “from an early age not to promote their own interests and to focus instead on the needs of others”, even when those others are baying hordes of anonymous mansplainers, desperate – just desperate – to yell at a void the same gender as their mum.
Twitter’s forced my reckoning with the limits of this unnatural, feminised agreeableness. The level of politeness expected at a party isn’t possible in an environment this crowded. Mona Chalabi crunched some numbers on social interactions for FiveThirtyEight.Com, citing sociological evidence that humans can only maintain stable relationships with around 150 people. In the throes of Twitter madness, I had fights with that many every day.
Beyond blocking outright Nazis and haters, I’ve now permitted myself to block the petty, the hostile, nasty, monomaniacal … even the merely tiresome. “Your timeline is not a democracy,” a friend once said, and the paradox here is that the range of political views I engage on Twitter is of far greater ideological diversity now that I’ve gained the confidence to filter out emotional noise, even – maybe, especially - from my “own side”. Ten thousand accounts I’ve banished from my feed to render the medium as exciting as I once imagined that it could be. Affirmed here is not only my right to select my own company, but also to return to the standards I once applied to reading newspapers; I’ve got time to digest the op-eds because I’ve skipped the chess puzzles and car section. Moreover, I’ve noticed my own reach expanding much further beyond my own political community, as I’ve taken to Twitter with far less defensiveness.
Trolls are the worst and deserve civil punishment, with Twitter’s full assistance. They don’t, however, deserve an audience, as much as they desire one. But in the era of Trumpbots, fake news and digital propaganda, any choice to eschew madness for clarity exercises a muscle that demarcates reason from unreason, good judgment from bad, leadership from mere loudness. The alternative is to allow a Twitter diet of red meat, meth and steroids to atrophy the newsrooms of our democracy, and the heart of both.
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