What is the point of Twitter?
Digital town square or a place for moralising and outrage—or both?
Recently I wrote about our constitutional response to COVID, and the response from Twitter was predictable. WinstonSmith.cashOnly described it as “the ramblings of a mad man”. Of my argument that we should appreciate dissent and respect minority values, kay bee replied eloquently, but not entirely convincingly, “Absolute rubbish”. Danielle, Crass Twitter Lady was having none of it, telling her nearly 7,000 followers, “I haven’t given up on vilifying dissenters”, and Brent was also itching to unload “more opprobrium” on them. Amusing though it is to watch people saying the quiet part out loud, it also got me thinking about the role of a platform I quit in 2020.
The world’s richest man recently bought Twitter for a hefty US$44 billion because “Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”. That richest man, Elon Musk, is a prolific user himself with his 99 million followers putting him in the top 10 accounts with the likes of Barack Obama, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi.
But step back from the super users, and it appears that the majority of social media users fit into a group that British research described as “Progressive Activists,” who post “more than four times as much” as other groups despite making up only 13 percent of the population. New Zealand Twitter certainly seems to follow this leftward pattern, and the most frequent users cluster in a handful of professions—journalists, politicians, academics. Not exactly a representative sample; as one US academic said, “to really participate on Twitter, you need to be a really active Twitter user, and the number of people who have jobs that allow them to be active Twitter users is pretty small.”
It's the profile of its users that gives Twitter its influence; many of them are members of the cultural elite, setting narratives that shape public decisions. But this rather contradicts the idea that Twitter is some kind of nirvana for democratic deliberation; instead, it’s “a spectacle driven by a narrow and unrepresentative group of élites” says computer science professor Cal Newport.
That spectacle tends to be destructive rather than constructive. Tweets are limited to 240 characters, favouring the savage retort and the one-liner over considered engagement. Tweets go viral if they attract likes and retweets; they’re most likely to do that if they provoke strong emotions, especially anger and outrage. The technology manipulates us. Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology, says Twitter (and the other social media platforms) are “almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves.”
There’s a simple solution to all of this: delete your Twitter account. That’s what I did after I found that the costs of the platform increasingly outweighed the benefits, not least that the time invested in a handful of tweets could be better spent on something with more lasting significance—time with my family, a good book, writing a blog post that required me to think and not just react. Kicking Twitter to touch won’t be easy for some. The writer Caitlin Flanagan is blunt that her own Twitter use is an addiction, stealing the joy of reading and the ability to think. She also points out that habitual Twitter users will have to overcome social and emotional barriers to withdraw, like the loss of face inherent in admitting that “each one of us has given a huge corporation untrammeled access to the delicate psychology that makes us who we are.”
Whether you delete your account, like I did, or simply reduce usage, like Flanagan did, we’d all be better off if Twitter occupied less space in our lives and our public square. For now, Newport says, “too many people in positions of power remain hypnotized by its stylized violence.” But this may change—it’s increasingly obvious that the case against Twitter is growing.