Twitter gave us Trump. And then banned him. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty
Fifteen years ago today, an innovation was unveiled that has probably changed our lives as much as any other this century. It was on 15 July 2006 that software developer Jack Dorsey and his team launched an online platform where text messages of 140 characters could be shared in a group; six days later Dorsey sent his first tweet, launching a new age of reasoned debate and engagement.
There are some who want to celebrate today — principally Dorsey, along with the small number of other people who have become unimaginably rich off the platform. But for everybody else on the planet, I suspect we should welcome the anniversary with roughly the same enthusiasm that we would the emergence of the Ebola virus. For the further away we have come from Twitter’s birth, the clearer it has become that the platform is a source of unimaginable harm to almost every aspect of society.
In the early days, it didn’t feel like this. Like Facebook, Amazon, Google and the other Big Tech monoliths, it all started out so well. Twitter was actually fun back then. People said whacky things. There were cat videos. There was Follow Friday and friendships were made. As professional and amateur newshounds took to the platform, it became the fastest way to learn about any developing story.
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. Politics is a drug, and the most successful drugs provide an instant hit. But they are also the most dangerous, and the downsides soon started to assert themselves.
Soon many started using the site in a game of competitive grievance, or competitive sanctimony. 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.
And soon it became apparent that, while everyone was on the site, everyone also hated it. 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. Just as they used it themselves to spread their message.
This all reached its nadir with Donald Trump, whose presidency is to many people the most concrete result of Twitter. 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. 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. Where were these millions of Tory voters who didn’t like Jeremy?
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. 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. Very few people were sorry to see him go.
But Trump’s removal was the most audacious sign yet that the platform was willing to make editorial decisions. It could no longer pretend that it was simply a neutral platform — it had become a curated outlet. The suspicion grew, too, that they were playing more insidious games behind the scenes. 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.
Yet all of this is as nothing compared to the devastating virus-like effect that Twitter has had across the public arena.
It has undeniably coarsened public discourse. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. It’s addictive. It’s thrilling.
And 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. You simply say something silly and instead of the grown-ups just ignoring the small yappy dog, all respond to it. A whole day can go by in which some relatively good minds and a great many more mediocre ones have done almost nothing but got themselves in a lather about how annoying the small yapping dog is.
There are countless other reasons to loathe the platform: photos of dinner; stories of deeply dull train journeys or traffic jams; glimpses into the mundane aggravations which are bad enough in your own life without needing to read those of others. People misery-share their lives and the sadness and anger proves infectious. It is all a colossal waste of time, of course, yet is by no means the worst aspect of the all-powerful site.
That has been illustrated once again these past few days, with the anonymous racist abuse posted at black England footballers. Twitter acted as a megaphone for the most hysterical of these bigots, and highlighted the platform’s complete inability to sensibly and reasonably offer judgements about the actual state of the world we live in.
It made it seem as though these racists are vast in number. As though they are powerful and need the full force of every arm of the state to unite against them and quell them. Never mind that many of these tweets came from outside the UK, and that they were utterly dwarfed in number by supportive messages.
The New York Times, whose correspondent seems to spend an awful lot of time news gathering on Twitter, even went as far as to describe these as “racist attacks”, never missing a chance to take a swipe at Britain. But we live in a country which is by every standard one of the least racist on earth, with statistics all demonstrating a vertiginous fall-off in people holding prejudice attitudes. Britain is one of the countries most unbothered, indeed most favourable, about things such as interracial marriage, or living next door to someone of a different race.
We have one of the most diverse cabinets in the world and our public square, from television and film to our national football team is visibly and un-controversially multi-ethnic. And yet reading Twitter you’d have no idea of that. No wonder that in Britain, as in the US, young people think that they live in such a racist society, beyond redemption. Here on this platform a very few shrill voices can be so magnified that people mistake that sound for the country as a whole. And so, 15 years after its launch, Twitter has become not just a megaphoning platform, but a distorting one, and the distortion continues to have a toxic impact on real life.
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SubscribeTwitter is an open sewer of human stupidity, ignorance and hatred, and is designed to be so. It is a virtual world in which intolerance, mob rule and a tribalism dominate and are already seeping through the creaks into the real one. Sadly the genie cannot be put back into the bottle but like our Victorian ancestors, we can at least strive to build better sewers. Ones which direct away the most toxic elements and protect society from contamination.
Social Media is an open sewer of stupidity…. it makes narcisist out of all of the most decent persons….
All social media suffers from the same issues – anonymity, no filter and equal representation. Consequently anyone can say anything and the most outrageous wins. I am convinced that the generation growing up in this new swamp will be unstable and uncertain of any of the foundations of civil society. Social and cultural change used to take generations and mutual consent. This timeframe gave an opportunity for discussion, debate and understanding leading to adoption by the public. The new world order is dis-order, rapid change with no thought or debate (in fact debate is to be discouraged) and the extremes are in charge of us all in the name of progression. I used to think people were basically good and decent but I can see how the enabling of extremes by social media can put all we have carefully constructed at risk with the inexperienced young particularly manipulated to believe the status quo is evil. Civil war perhaps?
Can anyone tell me a single benefit of being”on” Twitter? Why on earth is anyone anywhere near the public eye on there?
Even if you were on there, why would you stay and who would care if you disappeared?
What’s worse? Twitter or the news media that take it seriously?
The “torrent of racist abuse on Twitter” received (one must assume they’re all on Twitter, all the time, and read everything) by the England players has dominated every BBC and ITV bulletin every hour of every day since Sunday night.
I’ll tell you what’s worst of all. Politicians who listen to these malevolent idiots who are so insignificent in number they should just be ignored. Instead, politicians ignore the electorate whom they are duty bound to represent. To appease the noisome minority they foist legislation on society which harms us all.
Can’t agree more, Twitter provides the BBC and other MSM with an endless source of moronic quotes – from which they can selectively choose – in order to misrepresent the vast swathes of decent normal folk – whom they clearly despise.
Morons feeding irresponsible “sh1te peddlers ” ….
It’s this. Twitter would have much less impact if the media and politicians took it less seriously.
They let a shrill minority, in a country of 66 million, influence policy and debate.
Indeed. Coming from a working class background I studiously avoid the BBC, but even I can’t escape this barrage. A conveyor of news that has convinced itself that this is “The Story” has, despite its apparent omnipresence, little long term future and without the amplification it provides, Twitter will seem far less significant. Perhaps Twitter is the wrong target and we should hasten the demise of the BBC. I was taught not to shoot the messenger, but I have decided that in this instance we should.
Luckily, the comments columns have as little impact as one would have hoped Twitter to have.
Twitter is the right target, not that this comment itself will be heard. Not sure why we bother really except to, again, thank you, Douglas.
The news channels don’t check their sources of the information anymore either. One post on Twitter which was particularly nasty and used the n word purported to come from a Henry Williams and the account picture was of an old white man and woman, it had a strange handle that didn’t relate to the name of the account. Hundreds of people had commented on this post many abusing white people. I was suspicious this was not a proper account and later discovered after some digging this person was a young black guy who had changed his name and picture to give the impression he was someone else and stoke the racism fire.One of his friends had even asked him why he was pretending to be a white guy, why was this not shut down.Nothing has been said about these false tweets or done about them as far as I’m aware.I am on Twitter purely because I follow motorbike racing and it is very good for updates but you can block everything else so you don’t see it. I only saw the tweets re footballers because I wanted to see what was supposedly being said.
Thanks for taking the trouble Dawn – therefore allowing people like me not to have to sign-up and investigate.
I’m fearful that every time I logged on, another small part of me would die.
Maybe I’m a 60 year old “snowflake” 🙂
Is it a ‘torrent of abuse’? Or, more likely, a couple of idiots who know how to press the buttons of the hyper-sensitive media types like the BBC, who themselves have their own reasons for over-egging ‘the torrent of abuse’. I do agree with DM – it’s a terrible idea (Twitter, that is) but, unfortunately, it suits a lot of apparently reasonable and ‘fair-minded’ people to make use of it. Sad.
In answer to your question, I don’t know.
I’m none the wiser from TV reports which are suspiciously vague. Due to my duties I saw a lot of daytime TV this week and it was on every news and panel show repeatedly.
I have no trouble believing that there are abusive trolls of all kinds on Twitter, because I’ve seen them, but the broadcast media offered no specific examples. We just have to take their word for it and agree with them that the way to defeat racism is call everything racist even more often
I notice TV news has escalated their language.
Today I heard them referring to the reported torrent of Twitter abuse as “the racial attack”.
I listened a bit longer to see if this was some new outrage, but no, it was England penalty-takers again.
I spent 3 months on Twitter before closing my account and have no intention of ever engaging with it again. I cannot bear how so many journalists, writing about a certain issue/event, fail to go out and actually talk to people to obtain different perspectives. No. They use the ubiquitous “and here’s what the Twittersphere has to say”, before lazily embedding 5 tweets from people that probably know f.a about said subject and think that represents journalism.
Urgh.
I don’t have a Twitter account and never will, because I see what it is and how it feeds on our neuroses. But Douglas doesn’t mention what I think is the single worst element of Twitter: how it is relied on and amplified by an ever-weaker legacy media. Twitter wouldn’t matter fractionally as much as it does, were it not for the fact that HuffPo, Vox, Slate, the Guardian, BBC, etc ad nauseam all use it as an incredibly cheap source of “news”, and it is tailor-made for clickbait (which legacy media badly need). Twitter starts a rancid story, accusation or meme, which is then picked up by HuffPo or the Guardian, thence to the BBC and NYTimes, and it magically becomes a global story which foolish politicians react to, amplifying it even further. We see it constantly.
“There are countless other reasons to loathe the platform: photos of dinner; stories of deeply dull train journeys or traffic jams; glimpses into the mundane aggravations which are bad enough in your own life without needing to read those of others. People misery-share their lives and the sadness and anger proves infectious. It is all a colossal waste of time, of course, yet is by no means the worst aspect of the all-powerful site.”
Facebook is a similar offender. It is very draining scrolling through multiple ‘awareness’ posts by people who mean well and whose cause is often just, but the accumulative effect is that it washes over you.
I did use Twitter for a while, mainly to follow election results as they came in as the local info was useful, but the nastiness was too much for me. Even more so than the nastiness itself was the site of people I had held good opinions of engaging in this stuff. My account probably still exists but it has been years since I visited it. A good decision, I think.
Nastiness does not bother me at all, I care as much of being verbally attacked as having a squirrel bark at me as I walk my dog because I do not care what any of you sheep think of me. I have no self doubting or sensitivity that way. And this is why I am always curious about the horror of any posting which may be racist, genderist, sexist, and so on – who cares. Sticks and stones can break bones, but names cannot hurt, I guess unless you are weak.
Do we need to ultra police this name calling so strictly? Just tell them to F-off and carry on.
But then I have never read any Twitter, or joined, having no interest in such triviality as 140 character bleats, so may not understand.
I partially agree with you. For the record, I have never been attacked on Twitter, so I do not mean that I received personal abuse and left. I meant that the general atmosphere is unpleasant. I don’t find it a worthwhile use of my time to read scrolls of people ‘owning’ each other or trading petty insults. You are right, it is trivial and the word limit no doubt encourages this.
I do agree with you that policing people being mean is not required. However while I agree that in an ideal world words do not hurt, in reality many, if not most, people would find large numbers of strangers harassing them difficult to deal with, particularly if they are younger. Twitter users seem to enjoy doing this to people and that creates the nasty
atmosphere.
Edited to add:and much of the nastiness is in the form of short videos or images of people being embarrassed, or being harassed – see for example ‘white women tears’. People whose image goes viral with or without their consent and can have ramifications for them personally.
You are not qualified by any experience to comment on Twitter although, of course, you can have an informed opinion.
I disagree that words can only hurt weak people.
Social media absolutely sucks. But, thankfully, there’s an easy solution. Just delete your profile. Delete the app. It’s remarkable how liberating it feels and frees up lots of time to spend with the real people in your life. It also demonstrates how irrelevant social media is, all the offence, toxicity and anger simply isn’t there when you spend actual quality time with people offline.
I think it’s only a matter of time until more and more people realise how much of a negative impact social media is having on their mind and their life. Give it a decade and social media apps will be covered in government warnings like a cigarette packet.
Unfortunately lockdowns meant you couldn’t see the people in your life…
The entire public discourse and debate would be immeasurably improved if everyone deleted Twitter, Facebook, TikTok (and no doubt a hatful of other platforms that I’m too disinterested and luddite to have encountered.)
The vast majority of ugly hate stories, “cancellations” and offence archaeology that fills all media channels began life on one of these platforms.
I don’t read Twitter, I never have and never will open an account. Yet its daily tide of misery and bile is wholly familiar to me because all those journalists who spend their days denigrating it, can’t seem to help themselves from reporting on its every ebb and flow.
Perhaps if every journalist who purports to hate Twitter stopped reading it – and certainly stopped writing about it – the problem might diminish.
My kids in their 20’s and 30’s have all come off it,so have their friends. I have never had an account. Why anyone would expose themselves so openly to that level of vicious hostility, is beyond me.
I think that is the point here-why do people find it sooo hard to just ignore it…….-like you i have never been on it so i find the whole drama fairly ludicrous
I have two rules: 1. Don’t use anything that pushes opinions on you – no Facebook, no Twitter, no news alerts set up, no WhatsApp. Every time someone’s opinion hits me, I find I automatically engage with it and it is a waste of mental energy. 2. Only take news and media from people that you pay – I subscribe here, to a daily newspaper and a weekly magazine (funnily enough Douglas writes for all three). I also pay YouTube producers that I subscribe to via Patreon. Never consume “free” news.
It was on UnHerd that I engaged with a.n.other in a very civilised fashion, before realising I was being baited. And we pay for the BBC…
Sorry to hear that Jane. There are always a few idiots on message boards. It takes some commitment to pay for a subscription just to troll other readers. As to the BBC that is a source I pay for but don’t use.
There’s always enough Russian money around to pay some trolls to disrupt even decent platforms like this.
That is a good personal policy Matt, but it wouldn’t help someone who is not on Twitter, but whose employer is being pressured by a Twitter mob, boosted by news media, into firing them.
Yep all true and depressing.
In the old days, every village had its village idiot. But everybody ignored them and the idiots couldn’t connect with the idiots of other villages. But then along came Twitter!
and Facebook…
As the boomer in me would say, why people would read twitter, let alone write on it, is something that I REALLY do not understand.
And the politicians… Why in the name of the Good Lord would they risk EVERYTHING to be present on that or any other digital platform? Someone needs to explain it to me.
Narcissism writ large – like a mega-Banksy unrequested in a public square yet unavoidable.
No ifs or buts or stays of execution it needs to be banned right now and the press must be forbidden from referencing it, for which I think they would be grateful
I have never had a Twitter account either, but people occasionally send clips to me on WhatsApp. I post rarely on very limited sites, but, even there, I have come across contributors I suspect do not actually believe what they are saying. Some sad individuals will deliberately inflame a situation, or others’ sensitivities, because they get a thrill from starting and watching a fire. Racist comments particularly, posted anonymously, are more than likely just bait – and poisoned bait at that.
Twitter is the nastiest of all and especially because you cannot dislike a post… the whole set up is massively skewed. If you don’t agree with someone’s post, you either have to scroll past or reply.
Then again corporate media is a nasty, bleak and biased world as well.
All this is true. But you, Douglas, still operate an account there. Why is that?
Therein lies the answer.
He does (and I follow him) but there’s degrees of engagement with it, and he tweets relatively rarely, and engages directly with other users even less (at least as far as I’ve noticed).
Twitter provides the means for the stupidity of the human race to express itself.
My daughter, who is 16, says grownups don’t understand social media and think it is the real world. Hopefully, her generation will see through all this nonsense.
Only, it is the “real” world when a Twitter storm gets you sacked. That wouldn’t bother a 16 year old, but it’s certainly real to a middle aged victim. Shut them all down, now.
Twitter is the locale for hateful trolls and the pathetic, unimaginative who lurk ready to cast judgment on everything. It’s become a cesspool of hateful chatter and needs to be circumsized or made redundant. Mention the Bible or God on it and see what happens. It’s a place of pure evil and hate. Sadly, It’s become the public mirror given its range. Stop using it – problem solved – until human nature corrupts something else.
Twitter has become the Progressive Far Left’s version of 4Chan. It needs to be left in the dustbin of history, and ignored by anyone with even an iota of respectability, again, just like 4Chan.