More from this author Do the culture wars really exist?Īnd then there is the chihuahua effect: the way in which any small, yappy animal can distract the platform for at least a day at a time. Would-be chihuahuas can get the hang of this very easily. Where once people simply shrugged, now they “take to Twitter”, in the annoying parlance, to show that they are unimpressed, or to tell people off for saying something which they disagree. There is a performative rage which the platform has encouraged, and which people find it hard to withdraw from once they are caught up in it. The platform has also given the greatest possible voice to the general scold: the type of person who achieves great pleasure in taking offence and even causing someone to lose their livelihood or reputation - the “I am offended by that” or “I don’t find that funny” brigade. They berate other journalists, as though they are masters of the genre whose verdict is final. The pleasant communal hackery of old has been replaced by a melee of endless fall-outs, unnecessarily initiated and often with irreparable results. There is almost no prominent figure on Twitter who hasn’t lowered themselves in one’s estimation. There are those who use the platform as a venue to carp about everything that their contemporaries, rivals or friends are saying. There are commentators and journalists for whom I used to have some respect, but who use Twitter so constantly that I read their work with ever less anticipation and regard. It has undeniably coarsened public discourse. Yet all of this is as nothing compared to the devastating virus-like effect that Twitter has had across the public arena. Twitter had always denied the practice of shadow-banning, which is when a user’s tweets mysteriously stop appearing, before it was eventually confirmed by Twitter that they were doing exactly that. The suspicion grew, too, that they were playing more insidious games behind the scenes. It could no longer pretend that it was simply a neutral platform - it had become a curated outlet. Very few people were sorry to see him go.īut Trump’s removal was the most audacious sign yet that the platform was willing to make editorial decisions.
He went the way of Katie Hopkins into the next world (aka Parler) along with a string of others. Just this past weekend an odious little toad and anti-Semite called Nick Fuentes was chucked off the platform. Twitter began to ask itself the same questions, and finally, after Trump’s response to the disturbances of 6 January, the decision was made to chuck the most famous and powerful man in the world off the platform. More from this author The fightback against Critical Race Theory Where were these millions of Tory voters who didn’t like Jeremy? When he won the presidency and then thanked Twitter for the helping him to get it, many of these natural Twitter followers lost their faith in the platform. How could they have let it happen? It was their platform, after all, this noisy minority of the American and British electorate. Indeed, if you had read UK Twitter ahead of the 2019 election, you would have been absolute certain of a Jeremy Corbyn landslide. The world watched aghast as Trump was able to say often the craziest of things to millions upon millions of followers, speaking unfiltered and directly - in a way the old news media would never have allowed. This all reached its nadir with Donald Trump, whose presidency is to many people the most concrete result of Twitter. Just as they used it themselves to spread their message. Those on the ideological Left began to turn against the platform when it became clear that it allowed their opponents on the Right to spread “hate”, a scourge which they defined generously.
UNHERD TV TWITTER CODE
They took obvious glee in targeting victims who had transgressed some moral code the obvious righteousness of these online crusaders meant they rarely recognised themselves as the aggressors or bullies.Īnd soon it became apparent that, while everyone was on the site, everyone also hated it.
Soon many started using the site in a game of competitive grievance, or competitive sanctimony. But they are also the most dangerous, and the downsides soon started to assert themselves.
Politics is a drug, and the most successful drugs provide an instant hit. If something was going on, Twitter was there first, certainly ahead of the BBC or any of the other news establishments who had to lumber through the old legal and editorial hurdles, rather than enjoying the lightning-quick response time of social media.
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