Tuesday, November 01, 2022

Flat Circle

When Trump was booted off Twitter, MAGA heads went mad with cries of “cancel culture”! and censorship.

Now that Elmo runs Twitter, the cries come from the opposite extreme.
That’s a compelling argument, except the number of people on Twitter is vanishingly small, and the amount of influence they actually have IRL because they are on Twitter is wildly exaggerated. My 30 something daughter is getting off Facebook entirely because she says all it does is mine her data. She looks disgusted at the mention of Twitter and speaks of it as the Twitterati do of Parler or Truth Social. She wants nothing to do with it.

Influential? Not really.

Now that Elmo owns it, some seem to think they are its rightful owners, that like the British concept of walking access to private land, using Twitter is actually a public right. But you use Twitter subject to terms of use, and if Elmo wants to ban your criticism but allow Trump’s, that’s free speech, too.

Just not the free speech you may prefer.

Rather than a new post, I'll just add this here:
Did you hear about the miracle Cuban coronavirus cure that we never got because of capitalism? If not, you probably aren’t on Twitter, where this fictitious remedy went, well, viral. “Cuba: We have an antiviral with demonstrably high success rates in treating patients with COVID-19,” wrote a small-time Communist influencer on the platform in March 2020. “China: Our studies show this Cuban drug has incredibly high success rates. US: If only WE could find a treatment, someone in the PRIVATE SECTOR needs to find a PATENTABLE treatment.”

The false claim received more than 56,000 retweets and 252,000 likes. As of this writing, it is still up on the social-media site. Meanwhile, in the real world, Cubans protested in the streets over vaccine scarcity, while China continues its draconian zero-COVID lockdown policy.

In the virtual world of Twitter, this was not an isolated incident. According to popular posts made by users of the site, the Merriam-Webster-dictionary definition of anti-vaxxer was changed in 2021 to include those who oppose vaccine mandates. (It wasn’t; it had been that way for years.) In a parody of performative progressivism, President Joe Biden inaugurated a line of environmentally friendly bombs. (He didn’t; the story was from 2008.) And the United Kingdom banned Fox News. (It didn’t; the channel decided to stop broadcasting there, because of a lack of viewers.) Simply put, Twitter has been a fire hose of ideologically motivated misinformation for years.

Shall I go on?  Yes, I'll go on:

Did you hear about the miracle Cuban coronavirus cure that we never got because of capitalism? If not, you probably aren’t on Twitter, where this fictitious remedy went, well, viral. “Cuba: We have an antiviral with demonstrably high success rates in treating patients with COVID-19,” wrote a small-time Communist influencer on the platform in March 2020. “China: Our studies show this Cuban drug has incredibly high success rates. US: If only WE could find a treatment, someone in the PRIVATE SECTOR needs to find a PATENTABLE treatment.”

The false claim received more than 56,000 retweets and 252,000 likes. As of this writing, it is still up on the social-media site. Meanwhile, in the real world, Cubans protested in the streets over vaccine scarcity, while China continues its draconian zero-COVID lockdown policy.

In the virtual world of Twitter, this was not an isolated incident. According to popular posts made by users of the site, the Merriam-Webster-dictionary definition of anti-vaxxer was changed in 2021 to include those who oppose vaccine mandates. (It wasn’t; it had been that way for years.) In a parody of performative progressivism, President Joe Biden inaugurated a line of environmentally friendly bombs. (He didn’t; the story was from 2008.) And the United Kingdom banned Fox News. (It didn’t; the channel decided to stop broadcasting there, because of a lack of viewers.) Simply put, Twitter has been a fire hose of ideologically motivated misinformation for years.

My only quibble is with the metaphor of Twitter as a "firehose of misinformation."  I consider it more of a squirt gun.  Granted, I'm not a Twitter user who scans the trending topics and looks for the latest idiocy being bruited about.  I go to Raw Story for that!  I read a handful of people (as is obvious from my posts), and sometimes the replies which lead me to other interesting people.  Semi-interesting, mostly.  Rather like the vast sprawl of Houston metro, I don't live in that mess of freeways and neighborhoods:  I live in the area between the YMCA I visit every morning (north of me by about 15 minutes, as the car drives/traffic allows), the grocery store almost within walking distance (east), the bookstore where I used to work and still buy books (west), and south a bit, for other services (haircuts, etc.) I also need from time to time.  Everything within about a 15 minute car ride, if you need a unit of measure. That's "Houston" to me, and the "Houston" the local media live in (everything inside the Loop) is as a foreign land (as where I live is to people who live inside The Loop, as we call it here.  The Loop surrounds downtown, FYI.  Very broadly, but that's the limit designator.  I've met people who live inside the Loop who visited the bookstore aforementioned, and acted as if they'd come to a foreign land.  You get the idea.)

I'm parochial in my Twitter interests, IOW.  Which is why I'd never heard of any of the stuff in those quotes above. Someone has.  But it's never broken out into the Twittververse I frequent, much less mainstream media, even though our national discourse is broken and all public speech is now conspiracy theories and WE'RE DONE FOR, WE'RE DONE FOR!!!

Twitter is no firehose.  Of anything.  Except to select people on Twitter who think, like New Yorkers in the Steinberg drawing, or Houstonites in River Oaks (deep inside the Loop, and very expensive.  Ted Cruz lives there. Molly Ivins grew up there.  You figure it out.) venturing beyond the Loop (for reference, I'm only a mile or two from the next "loop" around Houston, and there's another still further out.  That one is so big the entire circuit is equivalent to driving to Austin, which is 160 miles away.  These "loops" are concentric circles.  The Loop is several miles from me.) is to fall off the face of the earth into terra incognita.  There be tygers.

Yeah, not so much.

So has Twitter decayed into anarchy and invective?  Yeah, not so much:

I note all of this not to exculpate Twitter but to indict it. Because as it turns out, whether viral misinformation or rampant bigotry, most of Twitter’s pathologies that people are pinning on Musk predate his ownership. I know this from personal experience. During the 2016 presidential-election campaign, I was inundated with anti-Semitic invective on Twitter over my critical commentary on Donald Trump’s candidacy. An Anti-Defamation League study found that I received the second-most abuse of Jewish commentators on the site during that cycle. Twitter subsequently vowed to clean up its act, but though some strides were made, most anti-Semitic bigotry remained. After the election, I built a bot that exposed neo-Nazi accounts impersonating Jews and other minorities on the platform. In 2017, Twitter banned the bot and left the Nazis. In 2019, an account impersonated me and photoshopped a swastika onto a photograph of a baby, claiming that it was my son. When I reported this content, Twitter said it did not violate their terms of service, and backtracked only after embarrassing media coverage.

Again, not a part of Twitter I see, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.  And now I understand why my daughter considers it a sewage dump she doesn't want anything to do with.

I rather suspect that problem's going to get worse.  Ironically, the very people so dependent on Twitter look to be the people who are going to kill Twitter, in the name of getting their pound of flesh out of Elmo.  Same as it ever was, actually.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)