I think Twitter's problem is that it somehow makes people turn into vile hate filled people. There is so much harassment on Twitter I just can't believe it. Sure it exists on 4chan, reddit, and others, but I think Twitter seems to channel it the most.
Do you have a sense of how much of this was due to how Twitter is designed as a medium vs due to the culture formed by the people who tend to use it?
I know both of these factors feed each other, but I ask because I’ve noticed several Twitter design decisions that seem to lead to angry mobs. Short tweets mean low-context, sorting feeds by engagement encourages piling on, and the rapid feedback loop is perfect for amplifying righteous anger.
Sure, though I feel like it's worse on Twitter than in most places for a few reasons: it's really easy to retweet and disseminate someone's post, and the public nature of accounts/tweets makes it very easy to dogpile.
On Facebook you might get some flak from your uncle, on a forum you might get into a tussle with another poster, but there are natural limits to the severity and the scale. On Twitter many of these limits are stripped away - it's very easy, and very common, to retweet someone "look at this fucking idiot" and invite your circles to pile on, many of whom will have never heard of the offender before.
This is also how harassment and abuse on Twitter is worse than other platforms - on Facebook you might get into a flamewar with your uncle and face awkward family dinners for a while, but on Twitter a dogpile is millions of users large, and you're statistically guaranteed to get a few people with legitimate screws loose in that bunch who might actually SWAT you or stalk you or otherwise take things way, way too far.
Add this to the fact that Twitter's length limits discourage nuance and encourage soundbites and you get IMO the worst intersection of soundbite culture, outrage culture, and massive built-in virality.
There are a lot of things to criticize about Twitter but it shows a lack of imagination if you think the worst possible thing you could do with a 160MM+ daily active users is give them short form conversation dynamics, and that the other possible outcome is “it burns.”
It is absolutely possible that Twitter turns into a 4chan-esque cesspool of vitriol and hatred but at massive scale due to a gradual frog boil of 160MM+. Not to say Twitter had none of this, but again, it takes little imagination to worry about it getting much, much worse.
What I find odd about Twitter is that the toxicity level is off the charts. It's not as bad as say, the wilder 4chan boards or Kiwifarms, but it's worse than almost anything else.
Before twitter, it was. I mean, there still were flame wars, toxicity and negativity, but they weren't amplified and influential as they are now. I don't remember a case where a toxic mob on Usenet ruined somebody's life. Maybe there were such cases, but I can't think of one. But I can readily name cases almost daily where the same happens with toxic mobs on Twitter. Toxicity existed before, but now there are amplification and focus mechanisms that turn it especially vile and hurtful, and twitter is one of them. And no amount of censorship will ever change any of it.
Twitter is mostly a reflection of the way you use it. I had used 3 accounts to this day, and while i did encounter many hateful tweets, that's only a fraction of it.
Most of the stuff i encountered were very self centered, but not hateful.
I'd like to maybe add onto that with a personal anecdote regarding twitter:
I've never used it and had an account created from about a decade ago. The only people I had followed when I first created the account were a few random celebrities and public figures. I pretty much never logged in despite many emails from Twitter to remind me of my account. A few months ago I opened it up to look, and I was really shocked and appalled at what I saw. My reaction to it was quite visceral. The best way I can describe the content I saw is just "hate", not the general term hate-speech that people throw around, but rather just people tweeting hateful things and exhibiting what appeared to me to be their hatred over something or someone.
Sure in between all of that there were a few wholesome tweets of course. But for the most part, it was just hate. I didn't really stick around too much other than to maybe add some additional public personas I do follow (I guess in support of them). The whole experience left me with the impression that Twitter and perhaps social-media entirely, are really bad/toxic/divisive to our society, at least in their current form.
I think another big issue with modern twitter style mostly-one-interaction social media is the lack of a community.
Even the good old forums, I recall, would have people show up and behave more poorly than was acceptable, get banned, and then you could go back to interacting with your online friends. There’s a sense that the angry person who showed up is the misanthrope, so their opinion doesn’t hurt you.
Plus you have more of a model, so-and-so is grumpy and will insult me, but it’s kind of good natured or at least I know how to calibrate their ire.
A website was bullied off the internet because it showcased the horrible activities of horrible people. I'm far more concerned that a handful of Twitter users can memoryhole an entire community.
Absolutely. Twitter (and similar social media) have become a cesspool for negativity, flame wars, left-versus-right, and spam that make it intolerable.
That's a great point. I accept 4Chan and despise Twitter, both of which being cesspools of lunatics, but now I realize that I'd feel the opposite if the media reported on 4Chan drama instead and mostly left Twitter alone.
Which is to say, if members of the media were 4Chan users instead of Twitter users. Or more generally, the social ills I've been blaming on Twitter are really the result of the commentary class inflicting its own obsession with social media on the rest of us.
Today, Twitter is a planetary-scale hate machine. By which I don't mean "people post hateful things on Twitter." I mean literally generates hate, as in, put a bunch of people with diverse perspectives on Twitter and by the end of the day they hate each other more than when they started. Common ground might have existed, but they won't find it, because Twitter, like any arms dealer, works better when they fight. It even benefits from collateral damage, when they hurt people they didn't specifically intend to hurt.
Through its core design—short messages, retweets, engagement metrics—Twitter incapacitates the safeguards necessary for civil discussion. It eliminates context, encourages us to present each other out of context, prevents us from explaining ourselves, rewards the most incendiary messages and most impulsive reactions, drives us to take sides and build walls.
If Twitter is going to foster healthy conversation, it will have to change fundamentally. It won't be a matter of tuning some filters and tweaking some ranking algorithms. A big part of it will involve making us the customer,
not the product (Zeynep Tufekci: https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/965937392942305280).
tbf people on twitter are fucking insane. there is no middle ground for them, just hate or love. and they always need to have an opinion on everything. its probably the most toxic website i have ever experienced. people on it are treated like the average person when they represent such a massive niche. basically we should purge twitter and other social media sites.
Twitter is built for harassing. The medium makes it inevitable. you make a tweet and you shoot it out into the ether. It ends up on a couple million twitter feeds whether they asked for it or not. It angers some of those people, and they retweet it to show their followers how stupid you are. Now all their like-minded friends see that tweet in their feeds. A bunch of them are now aware of your existence and are mad and tweet back at you. This is far worse when you participate in a contentious issue on a hashtag. This is before you even get into hate-following and active-deliberate harassers. Then there is scale. There are a couple hundred million people on Twitter. If even .01% of them are sociopaths, that is a near-unmanageable problem.
Finally, a significant portion of Twitter is quite literally trolls trolling trolls. They both can dish it out and take it and don't see the problem. Good for them, but it's not compatible with everybody else.
The chan boards fit more of this example you're talking about of this sort of behavior which predates Twitter.
No moderation, no blocking, just 24/7/365 of hate all day.
Yet, for 20 years it isn't erased from the web.
Twitter may be bigger, but I would say those chan boards that are smaller are much much worse.
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