Get Your Tweets Out of My Fucking News
Stop treating the latest Twitter storm like it’s indicative of literally anything at all.
If you want to find 10,000 people who think that wanna-be Nazis should be punched in their pimply, socially inept faces, I don’t think you’re going to have a hard time. Similarly, anyone looking to body-shame the woman murdered in Charlottesville could dig up more tweets than I care to think about existing. It’s easier than ever to find 120 outlandish characters, with a suspicious number of retweets, and bandy those words around as if they say something meaningful about the state of America. But they don’t.
They’re fucking tweets, people.
And 99% of the time, they come from someone whose opinion I would never care about on literally anything. So why are so many “journalists” pretending like uneducated, spontaneous, and unfiltered tweets are worthy of reporting?
When did we forget that the vast, unending majority of people in the world are not worth listening to? That just because something is said doesn’t mean it has to be heard. Complain all they want about the “delicate snowflakes” demanding equal representation, the alt-rightards are by far the guiltiest parties, complaining about being “unheard” and “marginalized” not five fucking years after their Tea Party swept through Congress. People who think their tweets mean something are stupid. People who re-publish those tweets to make some self-centered argument about America, apparently, are pundits. (Though, as I’m airing out my complaints on Medium, it’s fair to say that we’re all a part of the problem).
Most people are not special, and most people are not important. The very definitions of those words preclude it. And yet nary an opinion piece or hot-take on current events gets published these days without 2–3 “representative tweets” supporting some bullshit artist’s claim that they “feel the pulse of America.” Every major news network posts and pulls tweets as a part of it’s coverage. People spray-paint hateful tweets outside of Twitter Headquarters, validating and spreading those ideas for personal gain. The hype machine churns — someone gets fired, hashtags are born, online petitions get signed and sent to wherever it is those things get sent (the Great Trash Bin in the Cloud). And at no point does anyone stop and say:
“This person is literally too stupid to spend any thought on.”
Using tweets to feel the pulse of anything is like looking for a needle in a stack of slightly different needles: it’s pretty damn easy to find what you’re looking for, and it’s pretty damn easy to get pricked. Saying “Twitter is OUTRAGED over ___________” just belies how little you know about social media and the idiots who prowl through it. Twitter is outraged about 10,000 things every minute. It’s only news when you selectively pick up tweets that outrage you, too. What’s worse, you simply light up the beacons for other garbage humans to find each other, continually spreading the same ideas that pissed you off in the first place.
It sucks that shitty people air shitty thoughts on social media. It sucks that people have to read them, and I don’t believe for a second that “free speech” means “free of consequences.” But I also think that digging through the bottom of the internet barrel and pretending it gives you insight on the tides of America isn’t worth anyone’s keystrokes. We mock social media all the time for being shallow, false, and skewing towards the outlandish, all until someone tweets something political. Then everyone acts like xXx_PepeCuck_xXx is this generation’s Noam Chomsky and Twitter is the Roman fucking Senate.
But most people aren’t Noam Chomsky. Most people will never have anything valuable or insightful to say about anything. And I do mean most.
I don’t care how bad your tweet is — if you’re not in an actual position of power, I don’t care what it says. And neither should you. Ever. If you’re an alt-righter and someone is pissed off about the lack of diverse representation in Hollywood (and there is a lack) — do you really need to write 2,000 words for Breitbart defending Iron Fist? Go jack-off to 300 again if it bothers you so much. If some burger-flipping fuckhead wants to moan about the long-overdue shredding of the Confederate Flag, let them. Those flags are coming down anyway, because smart people are talking to the people actually removing them. And if you’re this piss-ant of a pundit, claiming the “Left” caused Charlottesville because you unearthed a couple of idiotic tweets about it, you can go ahead and put Richard Spencer’s dick back in your mouth and kindly fuck off (but not to Texas A&M! Remember what I said about consequences?).
The fact is, Twitter is a collection of jokes, rants, robots, half-baked musings, porn spam, and trolls. It is a horrid amalgamation of ideas so enormous that any point you want to make can be supported with relative ease. But in a planet of billions, 10,000 people on a hashtag doesn’t signify a cultural change — it signifies 2,000 bored, self-entitled people who think they’re special enough to contribute 120 characters towards issues they will never even begin to understand the complexity of. That, and 8,000 bots.
25 times a day, I flip to social media to avoid the productive things I need to do and instead stare at all the productive things my friends are sharing. 90% of the time those things involve getting outraged at the outrage of others. But the outraged people are idiots. Their ideas are wrong. Their ideas are dated. And screaming at them online just makes you an idiot too.
And yes, collective Twitter outrage has shined a light on issues in the past. But it often creates just as many issues as it resolves. Because Twitter is an inherently selfish act, and true activism can never be selfish.
Maybe supporting the Southern Poverty Law Center, or engaging in local politics and voter registration, might get something done without an accompanying knee-jerk racist backlash. It might not feel as good to have your opinion online for all of 2 seconds, but we might actually accomplish something without a bunch of racists finding their call to arms at the same time.
And get your tweets out of my fucking news.
#fuckyourhashtags.
