Note: this is the second piece in a three-part series on social media. Part one can be found here and part three here.
Analyzing Twitter is akin to writing a fantasy novel. In both cases, the author must invent a world based on some outline of common experience. That world will be filled with heroes, villains, imaginary landscapes, and mythical creatures. Conflict will be epic. Everything becomes allegory.
In the end, analyzing Twitter is the more banal undertaking. There’s a limit to the amount of creativity we can apply to the topic. Our understanding of social media is deeply subjective. The transactions and transgressions highlight our digital individualism. In lots of ways, though, Twitter lends itself to a pack mentality.
Whereas unfriending on Facebook tends to elicit strong reaction, unfollowing on Twitter isn’t usually so consequential. On Twitter, blocking is the stuff of insult and signification (muting, as well, but to a lesser degree). You can block individuals or entire groups. A lot of backup accounts exist to bypass blocking (or suspension).
I’m an eager blocker, albeit within specific parameters. I regularly block Zionists. I don’t feel comfortable engaging proponents of ethnic cleansing. More to the point, I just don’t want to communicate with them. I’ve already heard everything they have to say and none of it is worthwhile. I mostly block them out of boredom.
People who comment negatively on my employment troubles are done, every time. Political disagreement aside, reveling in another person’s misfortune is a special kind of depraved and I don’t want that energy in my world. Snitches also get an automatic block. Tag my employer or an institution meant to impose discipline and you’re dead to me. The same goes for any weasel who attempts to induce a pile-on.
The last point may sound weird for readers unversed in Twitter, so I’ll try to explain. The pile-on—or mobbing or shaming or whatever you want to call it—isn’t unique to Twitter, but it happens regularly on the platform. (Jon Ronson wrote an entire [not very good] book about it.) It describes mass outrage at the perceived failing of an individual and often becomes a trending topic.
Pile-ons aren’t homogenous. Some are directed at vile people with considerable power—politicians and military assets and captains of industry. Others germinate around an entertainer—an actor, for instance, or a professional athlete—reported to have done (or said) something ridiculous or insensitive. But they also happen to users with only minor influence, or to users with none, usually when a VIP feels that political discipline is in order or wants to use some poor bastard’s shoulders as a stepladder. Once a pile-on begins, you have to wait for the energy to cycle through. Trying to interrupt its momentum will only incite more outrage.
The psychology underlying these events is complicated. It’s not singular, first of all. Different motives exist, induced by disparate social and economic positions. The rhetoric of a pile-on is fluid; you don’t control who participates or what the participants say. Two things are clear: being subject to a pile-on is an awful experience. And it’s easy to join a pile-on. For all the pious lecturing it inspires, a pile-on is fundamentally a thoughtless endeavor.
A pile-on begins any number of ways. Let’s say a celebrity quote-tweets another user with a snide or aggrieved comment. The celebrity may consider the action innocuous or defensive, and that may have been the intent, but followers will read it as an invitation to lambast the offender. Most of the time, the quote-tweet will elicit a few smartass comments, but every now and again a crowd appears.
It happened a few months ago to a recent college graduate who argued against the use of Sarah Dessen’s young adult novel Saint Anything for her university’s common read program (for perfectly valid reasons—namely, that the college should select something more serious and socially meaningful). Dessen posted a screenshot of the criticism with some whiny prefatory comments and soon a number of leading literary lights—Roxane Gay, Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Weiner, Angie Thomas, Celeste Ng—were utterly stunned, STUNNED, by Dessen’s unspeakable tribulation. So noisy was the complaining that the student’s alma mater apologized to Dessen for the indignity she had suffered. (The indignity, remember, was a student’s suggestion that her peers be exposed to Black literature rather than a white author prone to online tantrums.)
This kind of bullshit is customary for Twitter. Instigating a pile-on is sustenance for people with imperious personalities. And it’s a standard tactic of third-tier influencers protecting their turf—people whose influence largely is limited to the platform itself. No matter their specific character, all pile-ons have one thing in common: they’re organized according to a shared class interest (Twitter’s cardinal structure, as I’ll argue below). Class interests animated the pile-on around Dessen’s critic. The instigators were all successful writers of dubious talent, well-off liberals accustomed to adulation from similarly-positioned nabobs of the publishing industry. Piling on seems like a byproduct of confidence, but it’s actually a primitive form of ingratiation.
Pile-ons can also be planned, onsite or behind the scenes. It’s easy to spot an organized pile-on because its protagonists deploy the same talking points in concert. They also change the talking points in concert as needed.
And sometimes they appear to begin spontaneously. Observers really can’t tell. In my limited time dealing with an issue of public interest, I learned that it’s difficult to predict which story will catch fire or be ignored (some stories are slam dunks, true, but they’re rare and generally beyond reach of the non-famous). Making something viral looks easy after the fact, but for every episode that achieves virality there are 500 attempts that didn’t go anywhere. It depends on many factors beyond the user’s control: who sees the information? Does anyone influential boost it? Does it capture a particular mood? Does it circulate when the right combination of interlocutors is present? The zeitgeist isn’t always a product of logic and planning.
*****
We can get a better sense of pile-ons by exploring the culture(s) of Twitter. It might appear that I agree with the sentiment that Twitter is a horrible place, but I consider that point-of-view too narrow (believe me, I understand its appeal). To a degree, it has become Twitter’s brand. The words I most often hear to describe the platform are “toxic” and “cesspool.”
Despite this reputation, Twitter can be rewarding, fun even. The fights and insults stand out, but you can also enjoy a world of interchange that is fast-moving, eloquent, and insightful. Facebook feels laborious in comparison. With Twitter, users are kept engaged by rapid and asymmetric content, almost to an untenable degree, which is why it’s common to hear people say they couldn’t figure it out. (It is confusing at first, but after a while its rhythm makes sense.)
Here is its best feature: it allows people without credentials or social capital to interact with luminaries they couldn’t otherwise access. The interaction needn’t be mutual—i.e., the luminary might not acknowledge a reply—but responses are nevertheless recorded for public consumption, which is a huge departure from traditional media. Much of Twitter’s reputation as a hellhole derives from bigwigs complaining about disagreement. Some are downright miffed that the hoi polloi are so hesitant to recognize their genius. If we’re to understand Twitter, it’s important to distinguish between valid criticism and shitty behavior.
I’ve already covered much of the shitty behavior, so let’s spend a moment with the criticism. I use the term loosely, to describe pushback against bourgeois orthodoxies packaged as common wisdom. It’s glorious when some vapid academic with a mass following posts twaddle and gets ratioed (more responses than likes or retweets)—not because of the ratio itself, but because the ratio inevitably will be sharp and funny. The dissent can feel cathartic to users frustrated by the prominence of grifters and charlatans incessantly boosted by the ruling class. Whatever its flaws, Twitter is a terrific site of comeuppance.
I doubt that pushback alters anything but abstract interpersonal relations, which is why it merely feels cathartic. No relief from material deprivation is available on the platform. We must be content with the unhappy knowledge that professional activists and intellectuals aspire to self-gratification and aggressively defend one another’s right to pursue that aspiration. In-group power is paramount to Twitter’s appeal.
Twitter is also a great spot to gather news, which I view as its most useful function. The platform has evolved its format so that users have easy access to headlines (and accompanying articles) in various genres: sports, politics, gossip, culture, entertainment. Engineers have done well to make it a destination site: come for the latest news, stay for the cheap drama. Twitter’s investors want to usurp other sites that amass information by collating global affairs into digestible trends. Judge for yourself whether that’s a good thing.
If Facebook deftly sorts users into consumer categories, Twitter is its equivalent for ideological subcultures. (Again, I’m mainly concerned with the political usage of social media.) Those subcultures get stretched almost to the point of oblivion. On the left, we see liberals, progressives, social democrats, democratic socialists, [unmodified] socialists, communists, and anarchists, each a distinct formation (despite some overlap). And within each category exist peculiar and esoteric alliances: Bernie fans, Warren fans, Hillary fans (seriously, they’re everywhere on Twitter); Maoists, Dengists, Trotskyists, Hoxhaists, Marxist-Leninists; anarcho-communists, ultraleftists, libertarian socialists. Syria is a source of irreconcilable divisions on Left Twitter. The same is true of China, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Russia. Interestingly, Palestine seems to unite broad factions, although the issue still inspires plenty of bickering and has its own esoteric niches.
There are clear hierarchies, though. For example, users who want to position themselves as reasonable leftists like to ridicule or condemn “tankies,” generally understood to mean pro-Soviet communists with an affinity for Stalin. (In true Twitter fashion, however, people classed as “tankie” are no monolith; rejecting electoralism can be enough to earn the designation. The designation, in other words, is more a byproduct of social climbing than a cogent ideological formation.) Every group, hyperaware of its social location, steps on the neck of less reputable factions. Malicious ass-kissing is no small feature of Twitter’s incivility problem.
The term “Left Twitter” illuminates a critical aspect of the platform: that users organize into apparent subcultures based on racial identity, religion, nationality, politics, and so forth. You have Indigenous Twitter, Anarchist Twitter, Celebrity Twitter, Palestine Twitter, Weird Twitter, Nigerian Twitter, Muslim Twitter, DSA Twitter, Kashmir Twitter, Queer Twitter, Cat Twitter. Add your own adjective. The most notable of these modified Twitters is Black Twitter, which has had an outsized influence on the site’s rhetorical and aesthetic character. If you’re oblivious about Black Twitter, then you can’t understand Twitter at large.
Don’t ask me to define “Black Twitter.” Don’t ask anyone else, either. But it exists and allows Black people to proffer analysis almost unthinkable in corporate media. As to its material utility, I remain skeptical, but I learn a lot about Black politics and cultures from Twitter. So do white supremacists who aren’t in the market for learning. The medium owes part of its dubious reputation to the influence of its Black users.
That’s what you should know about Twitter: it’s a consummate site of projection. People don’t judge it according to disinterested criteria, but in reference to their own socio-economic positions. Racism informs its reputation, not some noble, objective notion of decorum. Celebrities tell us it’s terrible not because of superior perception, but because they’re impertinent. You can judge Twitter in a thousand different ways, but each of those judgments will manifest selfishness. Our values are reflected in Twitter, and imposed on what we want Twitter to be, which is exactly why it’s simultaneously loathsome and addictive.
*****
I recently quit Twitter, which I announced, naturally, on Facebook. I was nervous and dejected after posting the announcement. The whole thing felt unimportant and self-indulgent. Such is the effect of social media on my psyche. I often wonder what the fuck I’m doing. And then I’ll fucking do it, anyway.
Here’s what I had to say:
I deactivated my Twitter account yesterday evening (six years too late, my old man would say). It was an impulsive decision. I was tagged into an argument about a comment I had “liked” (an act that apparently epitomized the death of the Western left) and decided on the spot to wipe the account. People have different experiences of social media, but I’ve found that they aggravate my worst insecurities and reward habits I could do without. The bickering, the cliques, the bluster, the sloganeering, the self-importance…all eviscerate any meaningful notion of community, which is certainly by design. (I count myself among the guilty and apologize to anybody I’ve harmed during my time on the platform.) In moments of impending war–nearly all moments, in other words–the half-baked comments, self-serving analyses, and fatuous hyperbole exacerbate anxiety and alienation. Even cursory usage makes painfully evident that people will exploit any tragedy for clout and attention. The news feed compresses the violence of dispossession and poverty into a ready-made site of extraction for the pundit class, a rhetorical duplication of the imperialism prominent users pretend to oppose. Anyway, I know there are thousands of theories about social media, many beyond my pay grade, but it seems prudent to tread carefully around a platform that incentivizes our worst impulses—or, if you like, that discourages submission to our better sensibilities.
A few people jumped on the post’s tabloid connotations, but I mentioned the argument only to highlight the impulsiveness of the decision. I saw something annoying; my son was waiting to play a game of Uno; I didn’t want to think about annoying things in the presence of my favorite person; and I deactivated. It was unplanned. Later, I tried to make sense of the decision. I had removed myself from a community. It seemed right to acknowledge the departure.
If not a community, then at least a pack. Twitter’s pack mentality is its most aggravating feature—and probably the feature most emblematic of political rot in the Global North. Users roam in packs because they’re protecting market share in a digital economy critical to their vision of success. If Twitter isn’t central to your career—if in fact it has potential to be a career hindrance—then the tantalizing provocations common to the site are likely a net negative. A lot of people are in it for the provocation, of course, but it’s a poor substitute for prudence and compassion.
I’m deeply invested in Palestine, for instance, and to the degree that I have a reputation on Twitter it’s for commentary sharply critical of Zionism. When people use Palestine as a source of provocation, and thus as an abstract geography to be excavated for online influence, I get upset. Apply this logic of extraction to your favorite geopolitical issue and if you’re not hopelessly self-involved then you’ll feel the same way. It was rare for me to spend time on Twitter without becoming angry. The site no longer offered variability, only venal feedback loops of grift and exploitation. They’re all I could see, anyway.
Despite Twitter’s redeeming features—the raucous celebration of Blackness, the immersion into multiple discourses, the reproduction of archived material, the fabulous wit and humor—it ultimately reifies a set of harmful class divisions. I can tell you any user’s politics by looking at their retweets. And I can identify any user’s hustle by noting whom that user defends and whom that user criticizes. Anyone can, really. Twitter can be infuriating because it’s easy to figure out what others are up to. If you see a prominent user solely retweeting people with even greater prominence, then stop hoping that the person has anything meaningful to offer the dispossessed. They don’t. They’re building a brand. And the dispossessed are useful to that end and for no other reason.
Like Facebook, the site’s nomenclature gives away its fundamental problem. You “follow” others, which means you exist in unequal relations of power. Prominence makes for easy accumulation. Am I reading too much into what is supposed to be innocent terminology? Sure I am. And you should, too. It’s important to think past intention and instead examine function and outcome. Twitter’s shareholders are quite happy for us to accept the terms they impose on our usage.
These recognitions are exhausting. But consider the implications of trading critical engagement for comfort. Twitter executives won’t complain if users who covet a better version of humanity are miserable using their platform. And our complaining won’t disrupt anything. The more we try to change Twitter for the better, the less control we have over the platform’s dazzling machinery.
*****
Here’s the thing about all the dipshits and loudmouths and self-promoters on Twitter: leave Twitter and they disappear. If you’re online, it’s easy to get sucked in. It’s rather like putting nicotine into your body and then alleviating the ensuing yen with cigarettes—the sense of relief arises not from the product, but from the addiction.
But if you go away, the dipshits and loudmouths and self-promoters do, too. The vast majority exist only on the platform. In fact, the platform is a terrific surrogate for the absence of competence and knowledge. Leaving Twitter wasn’t a forfeiture of my voice; it was a way to avoid conscription into stupidity.
For me, Twitter served the important purpose of self-reflection about what sort of political consumer I want to be, what sort of friend, caretaker, spouse, child, parent. How many times did I withhold full attention from my son because I was stewing about some stupid shit that had happened on Twitter? How many times was I distant and moody because the world’s impending doom was condensed into my newsfeed? Users constitute the platform, but the platform has a frightening ability to constitute its users’ sense of emotional security. We’re supposed to log on and fight, be pugilists, tough and witty and unbothered, but I’ve already spent the greater part of my life in struggle, already know landscapes of pain and rejection. I don’t need a digital facsimile of virtue to recognize the value of everyday decency. Where did the online fighting get me? Or you? How has it enriched anybody’s interior life? It made me behave as an asshole at times and at other times made me feel unbearably alone. That’s not an accident. Loneliness and alienation are Twitter’s most valuable assets.
I have an intense history with the platform, having been fired from an academic job for controversial tweets, something that for a while became a national story. In time, I realized that for me disagreement can never be divorced from a certain kind of distress and vulnerability. It evokes specific traumas and terrible memories of betrayal and opportunism. This emotional damage ironically makes me miss Twitter more than anything, for it’s a place I could everywhere recognize obvious hurt and in turn seek my own pack of outcasts, vagabonds, and castaways. If love is possible on Twitter, then it will be found among people of disrepute.
But I’ll never forfeit my demand for space in this world. People on social media scramble for a claim to Palestine, but I materially serve the cause every morning when I rise before dawn and drive a bus until sunset. I feel of greater use to the world delivering schoolkids to their parents—an act that never requires compromise. There’s life in pleasant interchanges with the working stiffs and immigrants who come to greet their children. But the people online with whom I’m supposed to argue? I don’t want to see their faces. They’re worthless spiritually, sluggish intellectually. Engaging them represents a politics of spectacle, each party in conflict for the bemusement of crooks and profiteers. No, I don’t want to convince social media dignitaries of anything—not of Palestine, not of compassion, and not of the joy they choose to repudiate.
And so my perception of the site hinges on exhilaration overwhelmed by hurt, by the slow and tentative realization that provision for a decent life doesn’t exist on Twitter, but in the calm that comes alive when Twitter ceases to exist.
You always nail it.