My homepage has a Twitter insignia and on the other side of that is my non-handle. It features no hashtag and simply two words: “Fuck no.”
That’s because, like oxycontin, it’s something I refuse to touch. Not because it wouldn’t feel good, but because deep down it wouldn’t feel good and it wouldn’t serve me or those around me.
Engaging in dialogue is one of the most sacred acts, and Twitter makes a mockery of it. It takes this thing that in its best form so much more of and ensures that we have the world’s worst version of it.
If I ask myself whether the world is a better place with or without it there’s no ambivalence in the response.
Twitter benefits?
The Arab Spring is cited as a pro-democracy moment fueled in part by the platform. Just as #MeToo was fueled by it.
But Twitter is also responsible for conflagrating racial tension. The birth of Black Lives Matter, for instance, occurred with Twitter spreading reams of misinformation.
Even the unconscionable killing of George Floyd was in turn misinterpreted on Twitter and other social media as a race-based killing. There is no credible evidence to suggest that’s the case, but this falsehood continues as an assumed truism for untold millions on Twitter.[1]The aftermath of the George Floyd killing is difficult to separate from a cocktail of Trump anxiety, pandemic lockdown and way too much social media. In mid-June 2020 Twitter said “since this … Continue reading
And of course Twitter fueled the presidency of Donald Trump, including allowing him to spread falsehoods to his supporters and to potential recruits. Even without the falsehoods, Trump used the platform to coarsen presidential dialogue to its lowest point in American history.
Where does this leave us?
I would, if I could, encourage others to drop Twitter.
It entices the worst of us: our simplistic opinions and vitriol. I have enough of those lurking in my brain. But unless I’m a stand-up comic who’s figured out a way to sublimate them, I know the world is better off without them.
But the problem with Twitter isn’t simply that it brings out the worst in us. It’s that through it we become addicted to sharing the worst in us.
When Caitlin Flanagan gets addicted to and diminished by Twitter we know we have a problem.
We talk a lot about the forces that can ruin us. Global warming, opioid addiction, indiscriminate business with China, racism, malaria, water scarcity. All true.
Add Twitter to that list.
Notes, etc.
| ↑1 | The aftermath of the George Floyd killing is difficult to separate from a cocktail of Trump anxiety, pandemic lockdown and way too much social media. In mid-June 2020 Twitter said “since this wave of protests began in late May, nearly one-fifth of all replies, quotes, and Retweets on Twitter in the US are about BLM.” It added, “That’s upward of 390M Tweets in all — nearly 3.8x any previous peak.” |
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