Wednesday, October 18, 2017

And The Birds Still Tweet. Or On Twitter.

Two articles I have recently read are the reason for this post.  First, Buzzfeed reports that Twitter was warned, several times, about a Russian troll account masquerading as an organ for the Tennessee Republican Party:

Twitter took 11 months to close a Russian troll account that claimed to speak for the Tennessee Republican Party even after that state's real GOP notified the social media company that the account was a fake.
The account, @TEN_GOP, was enormously popular, amassing at least 136,000 followers between its creation in November 2015 and when Twitter shut it down in August, according to a snapshot of the account captured by the Internet Archive just before the account was "permanently suspended."

Some in the Trump campaign retweeted tweets from @TEN_GOP before the elections.

 Second,  Mike Monteiro wrote a long piece about his disenchantment with Twitter, as a way of expanding freedom of expression.  A snippet from that:

The whole piece is worth reading.  I don't agree with every bit of it, but I must admit that I'm slightly uncomfortable with Twitter's format.  Those short tweets are almost custom-made to create misunderstandings and to be taken out of context.

And once someone does that, the effect can be like blood in the water for sharks:  The Twitter gangs* start cycling around the chosen "victim" and fun and games will follow.

That's not exactly what Monteiro writes about, I think, but it's related.  The conversations on Twitter can be one-on-one, between a handful of people, one-on-many (Trump, say) and many-on-one (and that's where the nasty aspects of Twitter are).

Twitter is not all bad.  It can be wonderful in quickly telling me what some people are talking about (not "all people," because none of us follows everyone) and it can bring news quickly to our attention.  It's also a place where the more marginalized groups can communicate with each other and create a more powerful representation.

But it does appeal to certain nasty aspects in us humans, probably because of the pretend-anonymity and the relative lack of negative consequences from harassing someone in the Twitter format.

Add to that the commercial and popularity incentives which  Monteiro discusses (which even include such weird practices as buying followers),  and we clearly have something with not only benefits but also distinct problems.


*  These gangs can be of different types.  Many consist of misogynists and/or racists, many of people with particular and strong political affiliations, and some are of the type which remind me of the Scarlet Letter:  People who delight in taking down someone who said something nasty or stupid, going as far as making sure that someone not in a public role is going to be fired.   There's overlap between those groups and the list is not exhaustive.