Populism, Twitter and how to be a social media academic
Here’s a story — an academic has been observing a phenomenon on Twitter for many years, writes a paper observing it, throws that paper open-access into same phenomenon, and skyrockets to altmetric stardom in 48 hours.
This is the type of success academic impact and engagement coaches hope for when they encourage people to use Twitter and blogging to disseminate their work. The standard observation from Internet Researchers, however, is that academics who engage in this practice are systematically trolled and threatened with violence. The trend of social media and academia is for many to discontinue doing dangerous scholarly and research work. The trend makes the professional encouragement of academics to use social media a serious occupational mental health hazard.
But what happens when an academic knows full well that the response will attract this type of attention and does it anyway?
Well, Steve Watson from Cambridge University can probably tell us all about it now with his article New Right 2.0: Teacher populism on social media in England published in the British Educational Research Journal on 24 July 2020 rising to the top of the altmetric rankings and within the 99th percentile by the 27th July.
As the altmetric website explains, “older research outputs will score higher simply because they’ve had more time to accumulate mentions”, so this type of success for an article only a few days old is no mean feat. Of most interest for this blog, the score also comes at this stage 100% from Twitter .
So how did this paper do so well on Twitter?
Watson wrote about a Twitter phenomenon where teachers are polarised into traditionalists (trads) and progressives (progs). In this space teacher educators are often accused of brainwashing teachers in arcane teaching practices. Watson, a teacher educator, likened the phenomenon to populist theory, calling it micropopulism, because it is associated with a small group within education rather than a nation. The observation of a clear binary and the stylising of a corrupt elite definitely has the hallmarks of populist practice, but populist doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but is in a binary. Watson would have known, though, that using a widely misunderstood and slippery word from political theory would be taken as a criticism, no matter how much care he took to explain it.
Twitter loves a binary. It falls over itself trying to create them. Twitter also loves it when people get outraged. Both affects keep people coming back to the platform and both are why the platform is increasingly dismissed as a place of a decent dialectic. But as Watson has shown, it can very much be a place that can be used to rapidly disseminate scholarship and ideas, provided one knows how it works.
Watson’s paper poked all of Twitter’s erogenous zones — binary, click bait, outrage. Watson is also a teacher educator and being a member of that so-called eduTwitter “corrupt elite” positions Watson as Twitter users’ favourite target — leaders we hate. Watson also uses a genre academics are comfortable with. In making it open access for all to read, he essentially sets up a chain link fence, rather than a paywall. This sets the ground for the debate through journals — the traditional theater of academic debate, even if it does enjoy a turn on the platforms now and then. Watson strategically repositioned the power dynamic in the debate to a place where he is better equipped to reply.
And here’s the thing. It’s because of Twitter that a communication strategy like this seems necessary. Twitter is a key silent poker of outrage. The puppet master in all this. No matter how desperately users try to overcome the binaries, Twitter insists on them.
This is how internet researchers have theorised what Twitter does. Social media encourages digital intimacy where online connections serve as a social function which reinforces social connections and bonds. This translates into affective publics where users typically bond together in like-minded groups. Despite what echo chamber and filter bubble rhetoric might suggest, users are usually aware of alternative points of view on social media, often sharing those views in order to challenge them. Instead of considering alternative points of view, users are more likely to use them to strengthen bonds with their affective groupings. People have been shown to rebut alternative ideas by quote tweeting them, actively searching for them and responding with comments, and calling in their followers to do the same. This action has been condemned on multiple occasions by people who do not want to referee Twitter spats or bring vitriol into their own mentions. Twitter is even looking at how to limit this type of behaviour and people who engage in it might be considered in breach of Twitter code of conduct.
It’s one thing to hold Twitter and its black boxed algorithms responsible for the continuation of binaries online, but that allows individual humans to avoid responsibility for what machines do. For example, responsibility for human failings has been famously relegated to algorithms in the past, the Global Financial Crisis being one of those moments. Apart from the fact humans wrote the algorithms, what this responsibilisation of machines does is ignore the emotional connections humans have with their machines. Using the analogy Armin Beverungen and Ann-Christina Lange use to account for high-frequency traders’ attachment to their algorithms, Twitter accounts are like children and sometimes those children misbehave because Twitter rewards bad behaviour. But also like children, the parents of those accounts have a responsibility to raise them well and ethically. Knowing how the Twitter algorithm treats one’s posts, both virally and in distribution, is an important necessity for the digitally literate academic use of the platform.
The alt-right has been taking advantage of social media’s enjoyment of binary for a few years now and the New Right (which Watson refers to in his paper) have also noticed the use of binaries and outrage. The Murdoch press is the master provocateur and policy makers are known to work closely with them to elicit outrage to distract from quieter decision making. Power in a democracy only requires the tiniest of majorities and constant division is all it takes to keep one side from gaining that majority. Social media and its favouritism for binaries is a key tool in that politicking helping people, who should for all intents and purposes be united, stay at each other’s throats. All it takes is throwing a rhetorical hand grenade into a group of already divided people to ensure the binary continues. Watson’s paper is a marvel in the physical object’s dissemination proving its own point.
