Toward A New Twitter Ethic
Yes, I know the headline of this post is sort of pretentious and cheeky. That was intentional. Sue me.
A bizarre number of online political commentary types have become inordinately obsessed with the behavioral comportment of self-professed trolls. That is, these types spend an excess amount of time worrying about what various nonsensical “shitposters” are doing on Twitter or elsewhere. To these highly discerning pundits, “online trolling” could well be the foundational social issue of our era, with huge, civilizational-scale implications for politics, culture, and beyond.
Do these pundits not realize that they’ve fallen into a trap that was very consciously set for them, sort of like Wile E. Coyote getting outsmarted over and over again by the Roadrunner?
To the extent that the trolls in question are any kind of collective unit with group-wide motivations, their goal is to magnify and exaggerate their importance. They do this by adopting a deliberate strategy of flooding social media spheres such as Twitter — where they know journalists spend way too much time — with provocative and outrageous “content.” The trolls correctly surmise that this “content” will eventually impinge on journalists’ consciousness, and the journalists will come to assume that the trolls play a more outsized role than they really do, thereby assigning unwarranted political import to the trollish conduct. Because many journalists and pundits are quite gullible, they will give the trolls exactly what they want.
When you get on Twitter you know it’s possible that you’ll encounter trolls. So rather than vindicate their self-aggrandizing narrative about themselves, and elevate their significance — why not just ignore them? That’s what I tend to do. Instead of getting myself worked up over people who are obviously trying to provoke me into giving them a reaction, I simply pretend they aren’t even there. It’s really, deceptively simple. And yet how one engages or does not engage with trolls has become a very salient political issue in certain media quarters. I know because I am frequently the target of accusations that I am abetting horrible trolls by declining to engage with them in any way. Mostly I think these accusations are leveled as a cheap pretext to score points against a perceived adversary — otherwise intelligent people can’t truly believe that whether or not you block somebody on Twitter is indicative of anything meaningful. Or can they?
It seems they really can — that’s how nuts things have gotten. So whenever I hear this argument — “Gee golly mister! You are a bad person because you don’t seem to block enough trolls! You really need to micro-manage your Twitter following much more scrupulously!” — I always reply: what precisely are you arguing? That everyone on Twitter has an affirmative obligation to individually “vet” every one of their troll followers, and if they don’t, it’s redolent of some fundamental moral failing? If so, that’s really quite a radical notion, and you’d need to substantiate it with ample argumentation. But I never get that argumentation. I just get one-off barbs and snarky asides hinting at this argument, and no one ever takes the time to fully develop what it is they’re positing.
I ask again: what’s the actual argument here? There is none, it would seem. If the argument is: “You should modify your views, emphasis, tone, etc. based on the reaction of anonymous online trolls. It is incumbent on you to make sure your online activity is not associated in any way, however tangential, with people who behave badly on Twitter” — that’s a preposterous argument. First off, why would you allow trolls to dictate what you do or say online? That’s tantamount to handing them a victory — you are exaggerating their importance and vindicating their self-conception as some kind of fearsome political force. All under the guise of “weeding them out” or suppressing their more disagreeable tactics, which is itself a fool’s errand because even if you spent several hours a day monitoring, vetting, and blocking trolls (which is literally what this proposal would require of me) it wouldn’t even make a dent in terms of their overall impact. You would be accomplishing nothing other than wasting time. If you really want to diminish the alleged influence of these trolls, then the way to go about it wouldn’t be to capitulate to them. Just ignore them! Sheez.
Also, if you accept the premise that whether or not one blocks somebody on Twitter should have any ethical content — that is, if a person doesn’t block a troll, that should be held against the person in a moral or political sense — what is it that you are actually accepting? It’s the mother of all slippery slopes. It grants the notion that blocking someone or not is a political statement rather than just an inconsequential, trivial act. Imbuing this act (or non-act) with profound political significance cheapens the notion of what it is to truly make a political statement. If blocking a troll can now be seen as a genuine expression of solidarity, then we have really weakened what it means to express solidarity.
The only political statements that I want to be held to are those that I actually articulate in my own words, whether verbally or in written form. Again, this sounds ridiculously obvious, but — I can only control what I do, say, and write: I cannot control what others do, say, and write, nor would I want to. This is so incredibly basic, but apparently it needs to be stated over and over again because people are erecting entire moral frameworks that reject this very simple principle.
I guess I’ll just lay out a bit of the thinking behind my “To Block or Not To Block” philosophy, since so many Serious People seem weirdly interested in the topic. Speaking for my own self here—and this is a purely personal preference — I don’t block people unless they are individually “harassing” toward me over an extended period of time. This has nothing to do with ideology. I’m not blocking anyone on the ground of disagreeing with their views or rejecting their criticism on political grounds, I’m blocking them because they’ve proven themselves to be a petty nuisance over and over again, and it’s no longer worth expending any mental energy dealing with their bad faith trolling. I’m not going to go around blocking people because they’re expressing repellent views; that’d be such a laughable waste of time, and it wouldn’t even mollify the critics who demand that I do this. The critics would find some other bad faith reason to insinuate that I’m not doing enough to rein in bad online behavior. What they’re proposing is such an obvious slippery slope that it’s best not to grant of the premises undergirding it.
It’s amazing that I apparently need to keep returning to this subject. But the single most prevalent criticism that I encounter online nowadays has to do with who might or might not be following me on Twitter. Almost never is this criticism accompanied by any thought-out take on what I should actually be doing about random online trolls, or precisely how this reflects on me. No underlying argument is ever offered, and insisting on an argument — instead of just self-assured declarations — is itself seen as gauche.
The criticism arises from incredibly lazy thinking that is never sussed out. It’s never sussed out in part because I think people intuitively realize how fundamentally fallacious it is, and if they actually did the work of developing the theory behind what they’re expositing, they would discover how quickly it’d fall apart when subjected to even the most minimal probing.
Newsflash: I really think people ought to be held responsible only for what they say on social media, rather than what random trolls over whom they have no control say. Apparently this is a novel concept. I also think people should strenuously resist imputing bad faith, or baselessly extrapolating motivation, instead of grappling with arguments on the merits. I know that Twitter can often feel like a suffocating miasma of bad faith, and therefore imputing it seems justified in some instances. But as a general rule, this should be resisted, because it leads to all kinds of analytical and interpersonal pitfalls.
The nature of social media is that you tend to put the most punchy side of yourself forward, especially in forums which necessitate brevity, such as Twitter. You can’t always convey the nuances which might come across in other formats. People are prone to drawing rash conclusions based on what they infer from a couple barbs or quips, rather than any holistic reading of what you are really attempting to communicate. A general undercurrent of bad faith imbues everything. And yet, there are things people can do on an individual level to mitigate these damaging incentives. We are stuck with “social media discourse” for the foreseeable future, so we should at least do what little we can to try to counteract its most destructive qualities.
My sense is that if I were to sit down over coffee for 45 minutes with someone who is completely sure that I’m a terrible person based on a few snippets they’ve gleaned from my social media output, I could probably dispel whatever it is that caused them to reach such a negative conclusion, and we’d find common ground. So I don’t take the vicious criticism all that personally. But I understand why others might when it’s aimed at them. That’s why we need to construct a new ethos. I don’t claim to have all the answers; maybe some of these problems are fundamentally intractable. But I do have some observations and suggestions. That, I think, is the only place to begin. I’m certainly not immune to faults either — I’m open to suggestions as to how I might behave more ethically online. But I have to insist that any such suggestions are grounded in good faith and argumentation, rather than cynicism and groundless assertion.
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