Bluebird in a Coal Mine

Let’s Hope Twitter Dies Before It Kills Us

First, Say No Harm

When you fail to comprehensively define what harm is, you empower everything you leave out.

I joined Twitter in 2008 around the time of Obama’s inauguration, and after fourteen years my account has finally been permanently banned.

Their content-monitoring elves have had a habit of overreacting to things I’ve said over the years, the most comical example of which was when they sent the Secret Service to my house during the Trump Administration over a dick joke I’d posted in 2012 — but that’s a story for a little later. What happened this time was that Mark Ruffalo posted a link to a news article about a politician celebrating the fall of Roe v. Wade and I replied expressing a desire to kick that man in the nuts. According to Twitter this is “targeted abuse”.

While the platform claims its goal is to protect users from harm, it establishes what qualifies in such a myopic way that it effectively excludes the most pervasive and concrete forms of it. The rules are rooted in a very right-wing interpretation of violence — specifically the attitude that systemic and indirect forms of it simply don’t exist. Every tweet is isolated within some pollyanna vacuum devoid of real-world contexts of oppression and suffering caused by the targets of many angry sentiments.

The result is an exacerbation rather than mitigation of the violent power dynamics that surround us. When you fail to comprehensively define what harm is, you empower everything you leave out. So by arbitrarily narrowing the scope of what counts, many social media platforms’ rulebooks — and Twitter’s in particular — actually reinforce systemic and indirect violence, making those things even more unidirectionally powerful.

This incomplete definition of harm also ignores that politicians and world leaders — and by extension supporters and advocates who empower them — actually have the ability to inflict it on others, whereas a sentiment of ill will carries about as much power as an imagined whisper dampened by the long dewy grasses of a vast open field. You can spend hours every day hoping out loud for someone to die, and while it will eventually happen, it certainly won’t be because you told your friends you wished it would. Meanwhile, your state’s elected officials can actually pass laws that will put you through the greatest misery of your life, and they obtain the power to do so by openly and freely campaigning — including on social media.

Examining my own particular example above, how does it not constitute “wishing harm” or “targeted abuse” to openly crusade against abortion rights when forcing people with uteruses to carry unwanted pregnancies to term can only be described as torture? Anti-abortion politicking materially contributes to a future where legions experience intense mental and physical anguish — a world where rapists are empowered to choose the mothers of their children regardless of consent (especially in states that allow them to file custody for some nightmarish reason). Despite this, it’s treated as a political opinion rather than terrorism, welcomed on the platform as a matter of free speech.

But heaven forbid you make an offhand comment about your unactionable desire to kick someone in the genitals for being so monstrous.

It’s alarming that Twitter prohibits empty wishing while allowing concrete conspiring. If it existed during WWII it would be a violation of its rules to wish Hitler would blow his brains out, but you’d be fine campaigning for his reelection.

The most infamous recent example of this grotesquely-imbalanced dynamic was when professor Uju Anya expressed the idle hope that Queen Elizabeth II would have a painful death — a tweet Twitter made her delete for violating its rules against “wishing harm”, ignoring the crucial context that the British empire is extensively documented as perpetrating heinous mass abuses under the oversight of the monarchy and this Queen in particular.

Users are allowed to show support for people responsible for mass misery, but the victims of the suffering those people caused aren’t permitted to express any ill will.

The Only Consistency Is Inconsistency

The problem gets even worse when you factor in Twitter’s inconsistent enforcement of the rules even in cases of blatant violations. It’s a frequent experience for users to report slurs [cw: slurs] or overt threats of violence only to have Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” team respond that they found no evidence of wrongdoing. And despite crowing several years ago about establishing a new policy forbidding misgendering trans people, they never take action against accounts that express broader equivalent sentiments like “trans women are men” or “trans women aren’t real women”.

The most materially dangerous people on the platform are not only allowed to campaign for indirect and pervasive harm, but are permitted through loopholes to continue to broadcast their open hatred to millions of people.

Beyond that, Twitter has historically bent and reshaped the rules whenever it suits them. In September of 2017 they made the controversial announcement that while nearly all users would be subject to the rules prohibiting violent sentiments and harassment, certain notable accounts — like that of Donald Trump, for whom this exclusion was specifically crafted after his repeated brazen violations that often endangered lives across the globe — would remain free to post whatever they wanted without repercussion because their tweets were considered “newsworthy”.

Bizarrely, this made the people most capable of conducting their violence the ones freest to do so — they’re “newsworthy” because they’re in positions of power that allow them to actually deliver on their intentions. If I’d had the audience and authority to actually kick Ron Johnson in the nuts in front of a national audience, would I have been more allowed to have said what I said?

Shortly after introducing this disastrous policy they announced they would at least add disclaimers to tweets they should’ve taken down had the rules been applied equally to all accounts — which is akin to hanging a “watch your step” sign at the top of an escalator that’s been known to occasionally fold up and shred people’s legs off. Once the damage has been done, the warning sign is almost more of an insult than anything.

This selective enforcement in addressing more obvious forms of violence further amplifies the empowerment of its subtler systemic forms. The most materially dangerous people on the platform are not only allowed to campaign for indirect and pervasive harm, but are permitted through loopholes to continue to broadcast their open hatred to millions of people, and their enshrinement within the platform’s “Above The Law” list effectively validates their messages and sentiments.

This all creates an ecosystem wherein users are inundated with unchecked systemic violence and often direct abuse, and they get punished for fighting back. Admittedly it probably doesn’t achieve much to tell a monster that you hope they die, but one would think that if these posts are so sacrosanct they require historical preservation, then it’s also important to include the context of how unwelcome their sentiments were.

For every person, there’s a quantity of rotten fruit that can be thrown at them that will get them to change their mind about something horrible they’ve been doing.

To the platform’s credit they did eventually ban Trump and his associated accounts, but only long, long, long after significant damage had been wrought. No point closing the barn door after the cows have been obliterated by a preventable climate disaster, as the saying goes.

Many people in this world cause so much suffering and damage that by not wishing them harm you’re passively wishing it upon masses of others. For instance, Joe Manchin’s steadfast obstruction of every policy that aims to address climate change will undoubtedly help ensure the deaths of millions of people and organisms and the suffering of countless others, but you’re not even allowed to tweet at him that you hope he gets attacked by birds. Maybe it wouldn’t make a difference, but it’s possible if he knew how much he was hated it would give him even a moment’s pause. For every person, there’s a quantity of rotten fruit that can be thrown at them that will get them to change their mind about something horrible they’ve been doing.

My point isn’t necessarily that users should be allowed to express harmful sentiments toward each other with reckless abandon, but rather that social media platforms should consider the complete scope of what harm entails. If you’re not allowed to tell Joe Machin you hope he gets picked up by a huge hawk and dropped from ten feet in the air over and over again, perhaps you also shouldn’t be allowed to oppose action on climate change — a significantly more concrete and actionable harm than an imagined avian attack.

If you’re going to ban violence, you need to recognize all its forms and not just the most overt — especially when wishes of harm are significantly less damaging than perpetuating systemic oppression and cruelty.

Computer, What Is Pain?

In I, Robot Isaac Asimov wrote about the Three Laws of Robotics — a set of unbreakable restrictions that would prevent machines with artificial intelligence from harming humans or allowing harm to befall them. This is a comforting idea until you consider what it means to teach a computer to understand “harm”. There’s a reason it’s taking so long to engineer a fully self-driving vehicle, and why we keep seeing videos of auto-piloted Teslas careening headlong into obstacles humans would easily avoid.

For similar reasons it’s also proven extremely challenging to automate monitoring social media for harmful content in a way that isn’t cartoonishly superficial and often defective. But it’s not just machines that are the problem: even if you could hire enough humans to screen every tweet for the complete scope of sentiments that contribute to harm, there’s no way to train that many people to know all the requisite nuances and apply that understanding consistently. It just doesn’t scale — it’s simpler and cheaper to have an algorithm screen for obvious things like “hope he gets hit by a bus” than to train an AI or ten million humans to understand the entire context of who Pedro López is and why someone might wish for him to fall victim to vehicular manslaughter.

Until this becomes a problem that algorithms can actually solve, platforms like Twitter should show considerable leniency toward anyone expressing anger by punching upward at powerful people, and they should factor into appeals that the target of a harmful sentiment is themselves spreading harm, or a notorious serial killer who’s still at large. A professor speaking on behalf of victims of imperialist abuse shouldn’t have to delete her angry tweet about the figurehead who oversaw and facilitated some of that abuse and who lived a life of privilege and protection using the prosperity stolen through that violence.

And maybe my account shouldn’t be permanently banned because I said I’d like to kick a powerful man in the genitals for celebrating a triumph of human cruelty.

Bye Bye Birdie

As far as my own experience getting banned from Twitter, to my surprise I don’t really miss it. In fact I’m even grateful that this situation has pushed me to finally reflect on my relationship with the platform and how it has evolved — degenerated — over the years.

I sense a lot of us have been in denial about the fact that the Twitter we enjoyed stopped existing over half a decade ago and we’ve been curled up inside its corpse hoping it’ll someday come shuddering back to life.

For Halloween in 2011 I dressed up as @horse_ebooks, a Twitter spambot that gained notoriety for producing surreal randomly-generated tweets like “famous crab” and “Everything happens so much” and “I Will Make Certain You Never Buy Knives Again”. Wearing a rubber horse mask and carrying a Kindle and a plush Sebastian from The Little Mermaid, I met up on St. Mark’s with some people I’d met on Twitter for one of our semi-regular get-togethers — “tweet-ups” we called them — where we’d make each other laugh over drinks at a dive bar or ironically-consumed appetizers at Applebees. Occasionally there were even standup-type performances featuring notable Twitter users.

This was the brief era when Twitter was a fun place for amateur comedians to workshop observational humor on each other using the latest news, occasionally saying something funny enough to get featured in a magazine or set a new touchstone for online culture. If you were exceptionally lucky your jokes might wind up on TV or even score you a comedy writing gig.

But that sense of community and camaraderie has been gone for a while — much longer than I’ve allowed myself to admit until now. I sense a lot of us have been in denial about the fact that the Twitter we enjoyed stopped existing over half a decade ago and we’ve been curled up inside its corpse hoping it’ll someday come shuddering back to life. (Though, considering the way many of the most active users have been fleeing the platform, and celebrities and other big accounts are fleeing after Musk’s takeover the other day, perhaps we’re all finally coming to terms with how horrible it’s been — and how it’s undoubtedly about to get a whole lot worse.)

We stopped making fun of these goofy fringe fascists and started more sincerely pushing back against their rising tide of serious cruelty.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things changed — in my recollection it coincides with the run-up to the 2016 election, but things had been veering in the wrong direction for a while before then. This is a weightier subject for another essay, but my best guess is that once it became clear Twitter could be used as a more serious vector for political campaigning — thanks in large part to Donald Trump leveraging his online audience to build a sycophantic political following — the Washington vampires barged in with their many fangs to suck away all the joy in search of their own gains.

The platform has always had political content and arguments just like any publicly-accessible forum on the internet, but whereas a decade ago the right-wing clowns were walking punchlines to be mocked for their bad suits and even worse opinions, when it became apparent there was actual power to be amassed, things quickly turned less funny and more dire. We stopped making fun of these goofy fringe fascists and started more sincerely pushing back against their rising tide of serious cruelty.

At this point it’s hard to deny that Twitter and Facebook have facilitated rampant disinformation and growing fascism with alarming effects, which makes Twitter’s prolonged inaction on suspending Trump’s account or mitigating his posts even more unforgivable. It also makes it clear these platforms aren’t really capable of — or interested in — recognizing and appropriately responding to actual threats.

The thing is, social media in and of itself has no intrinsic value — its worth comes from what you fill it with.

You Do It to Yourself, and That’s Why It Really Hurts

It’s horrifying to finally allow myself to assess the damage that’s been done to my psyche by all the devious mechanisms engineered to keep my attention glued to Twitter, both creating and consuming. I still find that my first instinct upon encountering anything infuriating or unjust or even personally inconvenient is to reach for the little blue bird to try to say something clever enough about it that I might earn some numeric accolades from people I’ve mostly never met in person and who likely wouldn’t even notice if I died.

Definitions of violence aside for a moment, we spend our time on Twitter creating free content for each other, which the platform monetizes by slapping up adjacent ads. Users never receive any cut of the revenue this yields — the authors of even the funniest or most poignant tweets will never see a penny of the wealth their work and thought and creativity generate. The thing is, social media in and of itself has no intrinsic value — its worth comes from what you fill it with. It’s the content that draws people’s attention. Television is an incredible invention but would never have taken off if it were just a box you put in your house that plays static all day.

Every time you tweet you get a kind of “loot box” of attention. This system of unpredictable reward drives us to hone our content for mass appeal — which in turn maximizes our value as an advertising vector. We’re doing the system’s work for it, making Twitter something worth paying attention to — and we do it not just through creation but by providing unscheduled social rewards to other users that will in turn shape their future content hoping for greater audience response.

I know this is a bit reductive — it’s certainly meaningful in itself to make something or say something and get a lot of people to look at it, or contribute to culture in a larger way. But the platform is deliberately engineered to be unfulfilling, to keep you seeking the next attention fix, so that it can monetize your maximized attention. You’re not getting real social reward — it’s a simulacrum, like the difference between a real hamburger and a 3D-rendered one in Fortnite. Rely on the latter for sustenance and you’re gonna starve.

All sorts of chemicals can bind to the same receptors, sometimes helpfully like when naloxone blocks opioids, but often harmfully like when arsenic supplants phosphate in the body, fatally inhibiting the production of ATP. In certain ways Twitter does something similar with the reward centers in our brains, making it feel like we’re actually achieving something when all we’re really doing is scoring brief dopamine rushes from ultimately hollow tokens of attention and appreciation.

On the less whimsical side of content, it’s hard to argue Twitter is some Greek agora where great minds gather to debate important issues. Spending hours embroiled in fights with indistinguishable right-wingers with bios like “patriot, marine, father, husband — in that order. #MAGA #StopTheSteal #LetsGoBrandon” is unlikely to improve our world at all because their minds are too dumb to change — but it still feels like you’re achieving something when you do, especially when you receive tokens of social accolade.

There’s definitely value in spreading awareness and combating hatred and it’s ableist to claim it’s Not Real Activism if you aren’t going outside and volunteering or protesting or running for office in person, but posting online can provide a baseline sense of satisfaction from even the merest performative gestures. Meanwhile people like Leonard Leo are quietly annihilating human rights in America, undeterred by anything you could possibly tweet.

(It may seem like I’m contradicting myself here because earlier I said that Twitter was ruined by the influx of serious politics when people realized its potential and now I’m saying that posting on it doesn’t accomplish much. Social media has indeed become a serious communications platform, but its actual power — like all power — belongs to those who already possess some in the real world.)

Engagement on our posts can also trick us into believing that what we said must be right because just look at all these people endorsing it. There’s a lot of power in social reward — even the virtual kind — and platforms gamify it to keep us coming back for more, even though it leads to reinforcement cycles that can bolster bad patterns and terrible ideas. The more we use it, the more we’re conditioned to seek approval from our “community“ — or more accurately, our audience. Social validation is an important aspect of human culture that stretches father back in our history than written language, but here it’s abstracted into tallies of how many people — most of them strangers if you achieve the level of popularity you’re hoping for — appreciate something you said enough to feel motivated to click a button.

People subscribe to what we post, but whether they actually see it is another story, determined by the whims of opaque algorithms driven by the platforms’ priorities.

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

Surely the appropriate arena for all these ideas and creations and jokes and news articles and political rants can’t truly be this one central place, but unfortunately the internet — this incredible global communications system with endless potential — has been reduced over the last decade into four websites everyone gets everything from.

Remember when you used to have a list of your favorite websites that you’d visit? Nowadays unless your content is on one of the few social media platforms where everything gets posted or aggregated, it effectively doesn’t exist — which is terrible for content creators. Ostensibly the quid pro quo of social media is that it provides a platform for you to access a massive global audience, but ultimately networks like Twitter and Facebook have effectively hijacked the ad revenue that used to go to all these independent creators on their own websites.

This narrowing of everyone’s attention into a handful of overloaded feeds also means we lose control over our content’s availability to our audiences. People subscribe to what we post, but whether they actually see it is another story, determined by the whims of opaque algorithms driven by the platforms’ priorities. When you post something to your own website, the people who visit it will see it, whereas when you post something to social media, not only will it be a single piece of flotsam in a deluge of other posts, but it will be filtered and shuffled amidst all that other content based on what the platform thinks will further drive people’s use and the ad impressions they’ll register. Posts you make with links to other websites also get algorithmically deprioritized — I once posted the same tweet a few minutes apart, one containing a link to a YouTube video and one without it, and the one with the link received half as many impressions as the one without even though it was posted first.

And of course, while your content will remain on your own website for as long as you keep it there, the things you’ve said over the years on social media can instantly disappear from your audience’s access because you violated the terms of service — perhaps because of spurious copyright violations or maybe because you said you wanted to kick a horrible man in the nuts.

Another side-effect of giving away free content for virtual token rewards is that it significantly devalues creative labor. People spend hours and considerable knowhow and skill and talent to make the things they post and usually the most they get in return is a big number next to a heart icon. Even on platforms like YouTube where you can get a cut of the ad revenue your work generates, most of the time you’re still just spending hours making free videos and getting nothing in return for your labor.

The content-agnostic UI results in someone’s fundraiser plea for rent money ending up sandwiched between a joke about Beavis being Butthead’s son and an ad for a credit card you already have.

You also have no direct access to the analytics metrics for your content and have to trust social media to tell the truth about it even though they’ve been caught lying — like when Facebook dramatically overstated the numbers of people watching videos, which in turn led entire creative industries to pivot to video and abandon text based on this fiction woven exclusively for Facebook’s own benefit.

This all becomes especially troubling when you consider how many people turn to social media to spread word about their GoFundMes, desperate for help paying for rent or necessities or medical bills. It’s one thing to play the Attention Lottery trying to get lots of people to laugh at your photoshop of Ben Shapiro scaled up to normal human size, but it’s another to play it for actual stakes.

Brain Problem Situation

This leads me to my deepest fear about my fourteen years of Twitter use, which is that my brain may have been permanently damaged from prolonged exposure to a homogenous display of radically different information presented with equal importance. The content-agnostic UI results in someone’s fundraiser plea for rent money ending up sandwiched between a joke about Beavis being Butthead’s son and an ad for a credit card you already have. Below that you’ll find a Palestinian teen’s video of missiles raining down on her neighborhood, some celebrity gossip, news about a dead actor, and a brief video of someone’s dog doing something cute.

A Simpsons meme. An ad that looks like real content. A writer promoting their self-published book. Did you see the latest episode of House of the Dragon? Is it better or worse than the new 2023 Toyota Camry? Chris Pratt should’ve kept Mario’s original Finnish accent. But what’s that got to do with a unionized BOFA? I’ve never asked for money before but this GIF of Vince McMahon can’t make rent this month. NASA is using a rocket to change the trajectory of Queen Elizabeth’s coffin. So much for “Dark Brandon” — looks like Biden is already walking back his plan to bomb Prime Day. Bad news from the Supreme Court again today as they’ve decided 6–3 to roll back David Tennant’s right to a Scottish accent. Today’s mass shooting updates are brought to you by KFC.

When I was a child it was annoying and a little disorienting to flip quickly through the channels looking for something to watch, but now our primary source of entertainment is just fleeting non-sequitur fragments. The psychological effects of bathing ourselves daily in this stream of emotionally-disparate but homogenously-presented information can’t possibly be healthy and likely desensitizes us to everything we’re seeing.

The benefit of chugging from this firehose is that we’re more aware than ever of the world’s myriad miseries and we’re finally having open discussions about their underlying causes. Lies told by the powerful are more quickly and readily exposed, and videos of wrongdoing can go viral enough to bring immediate attention to injustice. In a country where so much of our mainstream media is owned by right-wing extremist entities like Sinclair and where even “liberal news” serves the interests of wealthy imperialists, direct access to information from the people actually experiencing events gives us more accurate perspectives and accounts.

In many ways it’s truly remarkable what can be achieved.

I told him to “go fill one of [his] swimming pools with dicks, swim to the bottom and take a deep breath until [he] drown[s]. In dicks.” […] A couple weeks later I got a knock at my door and I peeked outside to see two men and a local cop standing on my front steps.

Unfortunately, while the human mind is evolutionarily attuned to pay attention to bad news, it didn’t evolve to keep track of such things at a global scale. We’re not equipped to handle every misery across the globe as it occurs in realtime, especially not in bits and pieces strewn amidst an irrelevant chaotic context. It’s important to stay informed of situations of injustice and suffering, but submerging yourself in it when you’re helpless to do anything to stop it doesn’t help you or anyone involved — aside from Twitter.

Our fear of missing out on fear itself keeps us glued to our feeds, refreshing in case we miss an important danger. This was especially true during the Trump Administration, when every week he would make some new awful threat that would incite everyone to react, driving ad impressions through the roof.

The U.S. Government Has No Sense of Humor

Speaking of Trump, a couple years into his presidency one of my tweets from 2012 got flagged for violating Twitter’s terms. It was in response to something he’d said during his deranged racist crusade to get Obama to release his birth certificate, and I told him to “go fill one of [his] swimming pools with dicks, swim to the bottom and take a deep breath until [he] drown[s]. In dicks.”

Twitter locked my account and told me they wouldn’t restore access until I deleted the tweet. I appealed multiple times on the basis that it’s impossible to harass powerful people, but they denied all my requests and I eventually caved and deleted it in order to get back into my account. The first thing I did was post a screenshot of the tweet with a comment like “can you believe the dunces running this dumb website construed this as a threat?” along with a thread about how it’s not possible to harass people who could send a tactical strike team to extrajudicially execute you.

A couple weeks later I got a knock at my door and I peeked outside to see two men and a local cop standing on my front steps. They informed me they were from the Secret Service and asked if they could come in, and I dumbly complied because I suspected it had something to do with Twitter and gambled I’d be able to talk my way out of it.

I expected they were there about a thread I’d posted a few days before urging people to gather en masse with weapons and buses to tear down ICE facilities with pickaxes, but the agent who seemed to be in charge asked me, “what do you know about swimming pools?”

At first I had no idea what he was talking about but then he elaborated, clearly a little embarrassed, at which point I knew the conversation was a joke. As much as they tried to make it all sound serious, explaining how Twitter had an obligation to escalate the tweet to law enforcement because it technically constituted a “veiled threat” against the President, at the end of the day we were having a conversation about a swimming pool full of dicks like some sort of Scrooge McDuck/Hannibal Lecter crossover.

I played along for a while, calmly explaining to them that I didn’t even know where I would begin to get enough dicks to fill a swimming pool — and are we talking Olympic or one of those novelty-shaped pools or what? — and sitting through some questions about my travel habits before I finally pointed out on their printout that the tweet in question was from 2012.

The more serious of the two agents took the sheet back, looked at it for a second, and frowned. “Huh. So it is,” he said after a moment.

The agent in charge explained that they knew this whole thing was a waste of everyone’s time, but that their boss was an overzealous new guy who was trying to prove himself. They got up and left, and a few days later I got a phone call informing me that they had officially dropped the case, along with another apology that their boss had made them come—a conclusion I’m sure feels a bit unsatisfying but I suppose an anticlimactic anecdote is a fair price to pay for an unwrecked life, especially over a stupid tweet.

Looking back on the last decade, it’s really sad how over the course of mere years Twitter transformed from a fun cultural novelty to perhaps one of the most damaging sources of entertainment that has ever existed.

The funny thing is, when I went looking for a screenshot of that tweet in my files, I found an old unpublished essay I’d started nearly exactly four years ago about the problems with Twitter, written when my account was locked and I was awaiting a response on my appeal. It’s been a long time and I’d somehow forgotten I’d even written it, but it contained many of the same points I planned to address here. This discovery is really driving home for me how unhealthy my relationship with the platform has been.

It’s a bit depressing to read Past Josh talk about how much lighter his mood felt after only a week without Twitter, how something I’d spent so much time using had so quickly become unimportant. It’s shocking that I had all these same convictions and reached all these same conclusions almost half a decade ago. At the end of that draft I wrote, “Eventually they’ll reject my appeal and I’ll probably be forced to delete the ‘drown in dicks’ tweet, at which point I’ll be able to use Twitter again — and I’m somewhat ashamed to say that I will probably go back.” I wonder what life would’ve been like these last four years if I hadn’t.

I feel foolish lingering in denial for so many years because of nostalgia for when it was fun — or perhaps because of guilt I’ve harbored over not keeping in touch with the real-life friends I made on the platform in the early 2010s. Also — embarrassingly — part of me never gave up hope that I might say something funny enough to open doors in the entertainment world. Alas.

To be fair it’s not entirely Twitter’s fault — the myopathy in their definition of violence is largely a mirror of the country at large.

These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends

Looking back on the last decade, it’s really sad how over the course of mere years Twitter transformed from a fun cultural novelty to perhaps one of the most damaging sources of entertainment that has ever existed. Perhaps the real reason they don’t adopt a more comprehensive categorization of harm is that they’d be forced to conclude that the platform itself violates its own guidelines and the whole site would implode.

As of now I still have my “official” account I created a while back, intended as a place to self-market my personal projects and post bigger ideas, and I might keep using it for that purpose. But I don’t think I’ll be going back to using the platform the way I had been, and this time I actually mean it — though I know how much that sounds like Addict Talk. Just like before, I already feel much better without keeping my eyeballs latched to a relentless parade of suffering and outrage, and I’m repulsed by the platform’s many serious problems, especially the ways it empowers the most harmful people. (And if recent changes are any indication, that’s a problem that’s about to get significantly worse.)

To be fair it’s not entirely Twitter’s fault — the myopathy in their definition of violence is largely a mirror of the country at large. The difference between Twitter’s narrow scope, though, and that of America is that at least in real life you can tell white supremacists to go eat a big bag of cat shit without getting your vocal cords removed as punishment for incivility — for now, anyway.

Much like Twitter’s harm-policing elves, Americans ignore ongoing systemic violence that dominates and destroys people’s lives, but will clutch their pearls so hard their knuckles break if someone finally fights back and throws a brick through the window of a Bank of America. The people in power got where they are thanks to these many systems of subtle but significant violence, and then they have the audacity to turn around and hypocritically tell us “violence isn’t the answer” and forbid any kind of reciprocation.

Do they think we’re stupid?

Then again, if we keep using Twitter and Facebook despite the damage these platforms unapologetically cause… are they right?