Not every dollop of platform drama says something profound about the human condition or modern society, and not every moment of Twitter backlash to some celebrity brain fart constitutes a “cancellation.” But the old saw that “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences” doesn’t capture the truth here either. Wade-a goal Republicans had been working toward for at least three decades before Twitter launched. This is how we get the embarrassing and dangerous spectacle of a New York Times columnist arguing that you can’t say the word “woman” anymore and that esoteric discourse among transgender Twitter users somehow led to the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Journalists seem to assume that the platform’s petty arguments are some kind of real-time snapshot of public opinion. Twitter’s popularity among influential journalists increasingly bends everyone’s perception of reality around the day’s toxic Twitter discourse. Taking online discourse seriously is important letting it become your only window on reality is dangerous, and when powerful people do so it threatens democracy itself.Īpply Heightened Scrutiny to Culture Stories More alarmingly, powerful and influential people-call them “epistemic elites”-seem to be among the most terminally online, and it’s having an effect on the rest of the world.Īs a scholar who's spent much of the past decade arguing that Twitter is “real life” and that harassment on the platform is a major social problem worth paying attention to, I fear a monkey’s-paw finger has curled in the wake of such advocacy. But claiming to quit Twitter only to come slinking back is a time-honoured tradition numerous users embarrassed themselves by proclaiming Elon Musk’s inevitably abortive takeover to be the last straw, only to find the site’s allure impossible to resist. There’s certainly been some chin-wagging about this-on Twitter itself (in one of its usual ironies) and in spaces like this one, where I’ve argued that the platform’s very design promotes toxic use. A specter haunts the Discourse, and it’s the sense that Twitter is bad for you.
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