The Awfulness That Is Twitter
This sewer of snarky negativity and misinformation needs to be tamed.
twit noun 1. a silly or foolish person.
Twitter is full of twits, of course. It’s in their name. They are a twit amplifier. They promote shallowness in the guise of succinctness. Sure, there are many fine people on Twitter saying good, brief stuff. But for each one of those who are perhaps pissing in the wind because they have a handful of followers, there are an equal number of detractors who get to take potshots at smart comments by good people, contradict the truth and dehumanize the art of dialog. Even if a person is not a twit in real life, they almost instantly become a twit when they tweet and play the game.
Birds tweet to each other in an aesthetically pleasing, very efficient, informative way so I reject the whole association with birds that Twitter has built into their logo and this verb does NOT belong to Twitter. Birds are superior evolutionary creatures that fly above, survive in harmony with Nature, can navigate the globe without GPS and pack much more information in their birdsongs that we may ever know. They know when earthquakes are coming before we do and can sense many things we are totally unaware of. Twitter would be more aptly named Shitter and their logo a poop emoji. In the mean time, we should at least rename the verb of tweet with respect to Twitter as: to twit.
twit verb 1. formerly known as a Twitter tweet. 2. to hit send on Twitter.
Twitter is first and foremost governed and driven by unfettered corporate greed. They didn’t invent that, only took advantage of it at the right time and place. The technology itself is trivial (compared to say an airplane or a computer) and almost any decent app developer could achieve the same or better software with relative ease. Technologically, Twitter is a pathetic waste of nominal programming talent that has done far more harm than good. But all those programmers are doing is their jobs executing the Business Plan.
Twitter is a danger to humanity because of its reach and its inherent shallowness. Like all social media, the reach of Twitter is its real threat to social harmony. If they only had a few thousand users or tens of thousands, they would not have such influence. But their active users number in the 300 to 400 millions and so they are, like it or not, an important platform, a barely-regulated, wild west virtual nation with the population of the USA, controlled essentially on the whims of one guy, multi-billionaire CEO Jack Dorsey. What Jack says or thinks somewhat governs how Twitter behaves. So it also acts as an info-dictatorship of sorts. Look no further than how a single sociopath with great power, Ex-President Donald J Trump, co-opted Twitter for spewing negativity, lies, misinformation, nasty attacks on individuals and businesses, and his political agendas to millions of followers—all with the imprimatur of and power of the President of the United States, perhaps the most powerful position on Earth. And because Twitter is by its architecture limited to short twits, it lends itself to incomplete thoughts, impromptu illiterate drivel, unvetted advice and brain farts that are then shared and spread like viral info-toxins to the masses.
Even though Twitter rightly banned Trump for inciting violence and insurrection, he has in no way been actually banned since he has figured a way to twit using proxy players like My Pillow CEO and his right-wing network called RSBN. RSBN twits several daily images of Trump “letters” that are often on “Presidential letterhead” that often are perpetuating lies and filled with childish grievances and political endorsements and certainly are not limited to 140 characters either. These, by direct association should be banned communications. Twit-by-proxy should not be allowed by banned people. Twitter bans are mere inconveniences to disseminators of drivel and like-minded users always pick up the baton and keep the toxic memes flowing like an army of thousands of Trump mini-me’s.
Twitter is terrible at policing the sewers of foul information flowing through its networks and often punish those that are combatting it worse than the perpetrators of dangerous misinformation, a most uncivilized activity. In fact it’s hard to find a rhyme or reason to its temporary locks on accounts (Twitter Jail). The most common cause seems to be name calling such as dummy or dimwit and even then it’s very selective until the offended party reports it. But the offended party is often every bit as guilty, if not more so because they may have millions of followers and are actually causing people to die with bad advice or by promoting lies that could lead to bad decisions or reinforce dangerous ideas. It’s all disingenuous and disgusting. Regardless of this inability to self-police, it may be baked into the medium like a Hydra that can’t help but grow another 2 heads when one gets chopped off.
Twitter publishes a phony set of Rules on what constitutes a violation of its “ethics” such as racism, hate speech, ad hominem attacks etc. If one is found in violation, one is first reprimanded and banned for a week, strike one. Strike two results in a permanent ban. All very well and good. They have a right. However, the enforcement is anything but even handed and the more popular one is, the more leniency they show. This is the exact opposite of what would be a healthy response which should be strictest on the most popular, those with the most reach. Take a look at Donald Trump Jr. who regularly twits things that make fun of Joe Biden’s age yet they list “agism” as one of the forbidden activities. Has he been warned or banned? No.
Scrolling through an endless Twitter feed is referred to as Doom Scrolling because it’s filled with negativity and bad vibes. Twitter is a Bad Vibes medium. Sure, people post lighter, funny materials as Cleansers because the sewer needs cleaning after all, right? The answer is no, you can’t clean a sewer. Such frivolous so-called cleansers are quickly swallowed by the void of Doom. Twitter is also an echo chamber and as one doom scrolls, the same “popular” or “trending” things appear over and over polluting minds with clutter. Throw in the incessant ads and surveys curated by greedy Twitter so desperate to make more money and the sewer is filled will all manner of crap and info-turds mixed in.
Like its personal info-leach cousins, Facebook and Google, Twitter is collecting data on its users all day. Each like is registered and metrics are pumped into large advertising engines to bombard you from every angle and steal some more of your attention and time and to raise your anxiety and manipulate your feelings. So in this way Twitter is more like a lamprey than a leach or in bird terms more like a vulture than a songbird, but even that is way too lofty a comparison.
Nothing is quite as pathetic as a Twitter Thread where a normal paragraph or two of a complete human thought is broken into shards of non sequiturs which themselves are liked and commented on and shared like festering fragments of a sentence with no context and no real meaning. Twitter is an engine of meaninglessness. I’m sure the 140 character limit was born of some inadequacy of storage of the original server used when Twitter was hatched. Watching a skilled writer such as Steven King or Barack Obama forced into shattering connected thoughts and ideas into a Twitter thread is painful and beneath human dignity. It’s a form of info-groveling at the altar of pointlessness and it always misses its mark and promotes shallowness.
The damage Twitter has done WILL be accounted for some day, probably in the courts or through bankruptcy or dissolution. It is a temporary company with no real high purpose and it is building up a cesspool of ill will, anger, depression, purposelessness, unworthiness, shallowness and gives pathetic 140 character voices to even the most lofty. It will either be drastically transformed or will perish from its own disgustingness. Even more likely is that the basic functionality of Twitter will be subsumed by a superior technology that protects privacy. Apple could kill Twitter almost overnight by creating a Comm platform, a sort of Personal News app with followers.
Twitter is extremely boring. I’ve spent most of the last ten years visiting Twitter very rarely as I found it to be very unsatisfying way to spend time. It was only when it started appearing regularly on the news as so and so twitted such and such that I gained anthropological interest in the phenomenon. I always come away from Twitter a lesser person, having been assaulted and insulted by the stench of illiteracy and negativity that permeates the feed. Largely, no doubt because I tend to follow those I disagree with and hold disdain for so I can study what they are trying to communicate to their real followers. From what I can see, I’m not alone and their threads are mostly filled with detractors and excoriating comments punctuated with feckless supporters or even worse, bot replies.
Because Twitter is so greedy for users, they don’t even care if they are human. Twitter bots, a type of automated software that regurgitates and spews canned responses to certain posts have polluted the sewer even further by amplifying and multiplying lies, negativity and agendas of nefarious players around the world. The malfeasance of not only allowing this but of empowering it by providing the programming keys to their feed makes Twitter culpable in huge propaganda operations that have led to many, many deaths for example in helping Donald Trump get elected by automated denigration of Hillary Clinton and false promotion of Donald Trump. Russian, state-sponsored programmers were delighted to take advantage of this and were quite successful. With Donald Trump came the extreme ineptitude and divisiveness sought by Russian intelligence and eventually led to the complete bungling of the Covid-19 Pandemic and hundreds of thousands of additional deaths. To this day, twits about Ivermectin, anti-vaccine sentiments, anti-Fauci, anti-Mask, anti-Science proliferate every day, all day long, and no amount of fake care alerts and warnings can undo the damage done. They are merely ignored by those who need them most.
Sadly, many legit and serious people and officials around the world use Twitter as a platform, pathetically twitting statements and opinions to their followers. Invariably, these are immediately glommed upon and retwitted by interested parties or attacked with either unrelated or tangential comments making each Twitter thread into a crazy quilt of nonsense and half-baked wit. The sad part is that these people feel the need to even have a Twitter account and seem pathetically needy of the extra attention of have a fear of missing out on this hollow activity. Honestly, it should be way cooler to NOT have a Twitter account and should be worn as a badge of honor and dignity.
Because of its nature, Twitter is a self-perpetuating sewer guaranteeing a constant flow of new info-dumps. The retwit feature makes sure the foul effluent is overflowing at all times, sort of oozing out the sides. This is literally an echo function that repeats whatever was twitted regardless of quality or meaning. The fact that quality items are most certainly in the flow doesn’t change the overall sewage factor. After all, who cares if a fine meal cooked by the best French chef is served in the setting of a cesspool? It’s a bit like putting jewelry on a turd, completely absurd. Not impressed.
Twitter, being a Force of Negativity, attracts millions of hit and run commenters, often commenting anonymously and without consequence in ways that would be unimaginable in real life and would lead to many a broken nose. But no, they get to say whatever and the snarkier and more nasty stuff gets more widely shared and makes Twitter richer and happier. The empty lives of the average twitter (one who twits) are filled with those moments of pissing into the Sea of Doom and awaiting a reaction. It’s super neurotic, addict behavior. Donald Trump, one 24 hour period, twitted over 200 times! He twitted so often at all hours of the day you really had to wonder when he had time to actually play President and attend to important real-world affairs. This may be an instance where Twitter helped us by keeping him occupied.
I take comfort in knowing that Twitter can’t possibly survive what’s coming— an Age of Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain Privacy where each person’s personal data is completely siloed into a Private Graph and the only thing apps can do is request access for particular items in that personal database that the owner temporarily accedes to. Any violations of this privacy in the form of harvesting and storing elsewhere would become a felonious activity resulting in bankruptcy.
On top of the technological changes will be legal protections, anti-trust and other laws that regulate the scope of monetization of private data and the monopolistic overreach that dominates today’s social media. The current deregulated Wild West of info-hoarding and sharing will be over sooner than later and something like Twitter will have no purpose or particular advantage within a decade without monumental changes in behavior. Who would want to use an unethical, shallow sewer-like platform when they could get a better, safer, more ethical and more aesthetically pleasing idea/meme sharing experience elsewhere?
If I have my way, none of the current social platforms will exist in anything like their current forms in a decade or so and we will all be much better off, happier, safer, less anxious and more human for it. In the mean time the least you can do is to turn off notifications for Twitter so you won’t see that little red circle with a number in it that makes you think you have something worth checking. You don’t.
