The best thing to come out of twitter was the large boulder the size of a small boulder. Remember that? It was in 2020. The San Miguel Sheriff twitter account tried to write "large boulder the size of a small car" but accidentally wrote "large boulder the size of a small boulder" and PEOPLE LOVED IT. That is top-notch humor right there. That's gonna be what I always remember twitter for.
On twitter, basically every day people would be talking about some new thing that happened, and everyone would be posting their own little jokes about it. Their little one-liner hot takes. That's what twitter did. Ideas would catch on, and twitter would just run away with them.
When it's just harmless stuff like the large boulder the size of a small boulder, this is great. But sometimes it was about news and politics and "us vs them" issues. And then the "take an idea and run with it" quality of twitter was not good. It meant we were misrepresenting what was going on. We were spreading misinformation. We were making ourselves feel like we're so good and smart, and those people on the other side who disagree with us are so obviously wrong.
I have 2 examples I'll post here:
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Example 1: AOC's dancing video
One day in 2019, twitter was all abuzz over a video that had been posted, showing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing with friends on a rooftop when she was a college student.
But the narrative on twitter wasn't "lol look at this goofy video, this is great." It was "AOC made a goofy video, years ago, and conservatives are outraged."
CONSERVATIVES ARE OUTRAGED!
Can you believe those conservatives? Can you believe how outraged they are, over college kids just being silly college kids? LOLOLOL, those conservatives! Acting like this is some kind of big scandal! LOLOLOLOL! Conservatives are outraged! LOLOLOL wait til they hear what Brett Kavanaugh got up to in college! LOLOLOL! Point and laugh at all the conservatives who are outraged. They think this is some kind of scandal, but it's not- jokes on them!
So many clever little tweets about how those conservatives are being so illogical, because they are outraged about this video.
And we all got caught up in it. I got caught up in it too. But did we ever pull back and ask the question: "Wait, conservatives are outraged about this? Really? They are? Who, specifically?"
Apparently the video was posted by a right-wing account, in an attempt to embarrass AOC. So, okay, whoever runs that account, I guess they are the "conservatives" who are "outraged." But, any other conservatives? Anyone? Does anyone even care?
The way people on twitter talked about this, it was like we were imagining a whole movement of conservatives. Like, you meet a conservative on the internet, and probably they are outraged over this video that AOC filmed, years ago. This was not true, at all. Seriously. This whole "conservatives are outraged" thing, that we all made jokes about, all those outraged conservatives that we mocked- they weren't real. There were maybe a few extremely-online conservatives who thought they had uncovered some kind of scandal- but overall, no, it was NOT TRUE that "conservatives are outraged" about that video.
So all those fun little jokes on twitter, about how those conservatives are so wrong and illogical for being outraged about this- we were spreading misinformation. There was no such movement of outraged conservatives. Maybe there were a few of them, but they were not in any way representative of most conservatives.
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[content note: example 2 is about rape]
Example 2: "Rape is a pre-existing condition"
In 2017, there was this health-care bill that Republicans were trying to pass, to make big changes to the Affordable Care Act. (It ended up not passing.)
On twitter, everybody was saying that this health care bill makes rape a pre-existing condition, allowing insurers to deny health care to rape victims. Here are a few actual news articles that give a more detailed description than whatever you'd find on twitter: Is Rape A Pre-Existing Condition? Not Exactly and Are pregnancy and rape pre-existing conditions under GOP health bill?
But twitter heard "rape is a pre-existing condition" and RAN WITH IT.
It was wild. Everyone was posting their not-well-informed takes about how bad this bill is, because "rape is a pre-existing condition." Someone tweeted something like "your health insurance company just found out your college boyfriend gave you a black eye, now they won't pay for your cancer treatments" and some other over-the-top unrealistic interpretations like that- and I'm embarrassed to say I retweeted that. I got caught up in this outrage too.
People were really on twitter advising rape victims to never ever tell anyone, because then they would lose their health insurance.
It was, wow, it was so bad. So much misinformation we were spreading.
There was a little bit of truth to it- the new health care bill would have allowed insurers to deny coverage for a lot of reasons, and in practical terms this likely would lead to rape victims being denied coverage for the types of health care that are often needed by rape victims. It was NOT a good bill. But the way people were talking about it on twitter completely misrepresented what it was. People were talking about it like if this bill passes, then if your health insurance company finds out you were raped a long time ago, they'll just suddenly start denying all your claims out of the blue.
A lot of people were getting their news from twitter rather than reading actual news articles. *I* was getting a lot of news from twitter back then too- this is unavoidable, really. What's the alternative- require everyone to read news articles to get the background information on what everyone on twitter is talking about, before they're allowed to log in? No, that's not realistic- and so what happens is you log on twitter and you see everyone talking about something, a sentence here, a sentence there, and you try to piece together what it's about. And then you tweet your own take on it. Ugh this is such a misinformation factory.
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"The algorithm" that shows us what we want to see and tells us we're smarter than everyone else
In my early days as an ex-evangelical, twitter was a really good place for me. I met a lot of good people on ex-evangelical twitter. I used to say "twitter is my church."
It really went downhill though, sometime around the 2016 election, and the pandemic in early 2020. Then my twitter feed was all doom-and-gloom, and I wasn't seeing posts from the people I used to follow- not sure if it's because they had left twitter, or if The Algorithm just wasn't showing them to me. As for my own tweets, I typically would just tweet links to my blog posts, y'all know me, when I want to say something, I write thousands of words about it, not 1 little tweet. But toward the end, I wasn't really getting any engagement when I tweeted those links. Maybe they were being suppressed by The Algorithm. Yeah, toward the end, it wasn't about me connecting with people, it was just reading other people's clever takes, people with way more followers than me- and feeling like there's no point to me tweeting anything myself, because no one will end up seeing it anyway.
And all these problems existed before Elon Musk bought it. And then things got worse because of him. There has been a lot of talk about alternatives to twitter- a lot of people are on Blue Sky now- but I've decided that's not for me. Any site that "has an algorithm" is going to end up being just a feed of little jokes about why people on "our side" are right and those people on "the other side" are wrong- how it's so obvious that we're right and they're wrong, so obvious that it can be summed up in 1 little joke. Oh... actually I'm saying more about myself than about "the algorithm"- it shows you what you want to see- what the subconscious instant-gratification part of yourself wants to see- and apparently what I want to see is jokes about why I'm right and other people are wrong.
A whole feed of little tweets, coming at you so fast, and you only spend a few seconds on each one- if you retweet it, that's based on how it makes you feel, not based on whether it's actually true and worthy of being promoted.
There's a place for that- there's a place for this kind of snappy little joke about why other people's opinions are wrong. We need that. We need the comedians mocking the powers-that-be. We need the political cartoons. But jokes and one-liner hot takes shouldn't be your main source of information about the news.
It can be a good thing in moderation. But I've found it's not healthy for me to have a site I can go to, and spend as much time as I want, and look at a constantly-refreshing feed of this kind of content. Then it becomes misinformation- then you feel that the issue really is as simple and obvious as it's described in the tweets.
When someone tweets a little one-liner about why some political stance is wrong, that tweet reflects that person's opinion on what the key issues are. It's about taking a complex topic and picking out one aspect of it, and showing that that aspect contains a contradiction. It's *your opinion* that that aspect is the important one- and sure, they may be good reasons that you believe that aspect is worth focusing on, your little joke may indeed point out something that people should pay attention to- but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that other people won't frame it in that way. It's not really that simple.
So I've figured out that I can't be on a site that shows me that kind of a feed. It promotes the idea that people who don't agree with me are so one-dimensionally ignorant that a simple little joke can expose them as being completely wrong. And it's an environment where tweets build on other tweets of people's half-baked opinions, like a whirlwind of misinformation.
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Related:
I'm not sure about "the cruelty is the point"
