When the blue bird tweets in pain.

Twitter tyrants think that banning their opposition will lead to the kinder gentler society that everyone should want. Their bitter selves won't allow it.

Pain is temporary, regret can last forever

Twitter tyrants think that banning their opposition will lead to the kinder gentler society that everyone should want. Their bitter selves won't allow it.

Like many of you, I am watching the Great Purge with concern and anxiety at the damage it will wreak on the USA as a peaceful society. While this is directly going to affect many of us socially and financially, I feel that long term it might be better that Americans decide to cut themselves off from the hobby of using quick doses of social media for self-gratification. The tech companies are selling the culling of their ranks as a way to save the “good user”, as chemotherapy is used to destroy cancer cells in the hopes of preventing it from spreading to the other cells. While I cannot personally leave Twitter, because I am already banned, one change you may know about is that I’ve moved this newsletter from MailChimp to Substack. This is because MailChimp has itself bowed to deplatforming campaigns against users that rage mobs have targeted.

But social media and society cannot be treated that way. Twitter has decided that those voices deemed intolerant or dangerous cannot be allowed to continue on the platform in order for it to be a safe place for users. In a 2016 interview with CNBC’s Jon Fortt, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey outlined how his working to make Twitter safe enough for users that cannot abide by hateful language, by using his mom as a template. This is an odd standard to bring up, considering the fact that two years later Twitter would ban a woman journalist named Meghan Murphy, a self-declared radical feminist, for the simple reason that she objects to eliminating the distinction between biological women and transgendered ones. I personally was banned from Twitter in 2019 over using profanity against another user, oddly enough a person who peddles 9-11 hoaxes and who himself would be banned several times. Every person that I had made friends with on Twitter has also been banned at some point, and we all have learned to live without it.

What the media won’t tell you is that most of America won’t have to learn how to live without Twitter, because they were never on it. Who may have a problem readjusting? The journalists, celebrities, “influencers”, and politicians that find their validation in how Twitter (and Instagram or other app) reacts to their shoes or dinner plans. That’s who. Below them on the totem pole are the trolls, brand builders, scammers, and coattail riders that seek the adulation of the privileged class. Twitter’s long-term outlook was never great, because most of the activity is weighted among a narrow sliver of its user base. Now, thanks to its vindictive campaign under Dorsey, Twitter is narrowing it even further:

• In 2019 Pew Research Center released a study that showed that the top 10% of Twitter users generate 80% of all tweets.

• In 2020 Twitter reported a year-over-year growth of 24% in mDAUs, which Twitter defines as those accounts that are visible and monetizable. However, this statistic was invented in the wake of Twitter suffering a collapse in its previous metric Monthly Average Users.

Younger, bluer, faker, weaker

The Pew study also showed that the average Twitter user base was already demonstrably skewed. The average user was 6% more likely to be a Democrat than the average American. Its user profile was 8% higher in the 21-29 year old demographic, and 11% higher in the 30-49 demographic than most Americans. But while the average Twitter user is younger than the general population, that does not translate to more users, and certainly not more users among the politically engaged older voters. In January 2016 The New Yorker featured an op-ed that predicted prematurely The End of Twitter. As it so happened that year’s election and Donald Trump’s presidency may have saved the platform by making it the go-to focal point for the most emotional and controversial conversations on the net. As the Trump presidency is at its end, Twitter’s decision to ditch The Orange One may be motivated by several factors; institutional political bias towards Democrats or a desire to shift the platform’s focus may be just one of them. On January 11, the first day of trading after Trump’s permanent suspension, Twitter had lost 6% of its market capitalization, a stock dip worth $2.5 billion. The next day it lost a further 2.5%, bringing it’s total losses to 13.13% since the beginning of 2021.

But if Twitter sees the future as brighter and safer without Trump, it will have a serious challenge “building back better” to where it was. In the midst of its massive purge of pro-Trump accounts the platform announced that it eliminated 2 million followers of Trump’s predecessor and nemesis Barack Obama, a total that was seven times larger than the number shaved from Trump’s following. Twitter has explained that this crackdown is aimed at “fake accounts”, but these repeated efforts may raise a new line of inquiry: How much of Twitter’s growth is organic? In December the New York Times wrote that the lion’s share of fake Twitter accounts deleted by Twitter are auto-generated “bots” anyway, but that they have more trouble with “handmade fakes” because parody accounts are still technically permitted. The issue of fake Twitter accounts will not disappear now that Donald Trump is off the platform, and with the user volume inevitably being lower at least short term the problem could become even more pronounced.

Feeding the rage bonfire

What should have been a career dream fulfilled became an instant nightmare for Milwaukee Brewers relief pitcher Josh Hader after the 2018 All Star Game. Thanks to Twitter “sleuths”, tweets dating from 2011-12 surfaced that contained words that were sexist, racist, and homophobic. Hader issued the obligatory apology and deleted his account. Lost among those raging at him was the understanding that at the time Hader was 17 years old. Less than two weeks later Sean Newcomb, a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, came close to throwing a no-hitter. As the game concluded Twitter erupted over similar tweets of his, also from when he had been 18 years old. The two MLB hurlers were not the first to suffer this bizarre ritual of having their moment of glory stained in Twitter shame. That April when the Villanova Wildcats won the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, their star point guard Donte DiVincenzo was shamed for tweeting offensive lyrics from a rap song by Meek Mill. In this case DiVincenzo had been only 14 years old, not even a freshman in high school.

The concept of Twitter mobs has been a concern for years, and not always for political reasons. In 2013 a woman was bombarded with angry responses to a tweet where she joked about not wanting to get AIDS while visiting South Africa. Since then there have been numerous figures whose Twitter histories have been used as fuel to burn down their reputations such as comedienne Roseanne Barr. One of the most famous Twitter mobs was the one that attacked Saturday Night Live cast member Leslie Jones in the wake of the release of the unpopular 2016 all-female Ghostbusters film reboot. One of her main antagonists, English journalist and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulis, was subsequently banned from Twitter, first on an indefinite basis and then permanently in 2019. This decision by Twitter would set a dangerous precedent: Twitter and other social media companies would soon decide that edgy and off-colour speech could lead to a variety of restrictions for activity. In 2017 YouTube decided to ban ET Williams (known at the time as “The Doctor of Common Sense") over videos where he speculates about topics such as the Sutherland Springs church shooting and Michelle Obama’s true gender. Both have been erased from mainstream technological platforms.

While Yiannopoulis was banned, as would be several other major figures such as Alex Jones and Laura Loomer, the behaviour for which they have been banned has never been consistently policed. Several major Twitter users have made their names through trolling other accounts, notably Dr. Eugene Gu and the two Krassenstein Bros. who consistently tweet in response to any topic relating to Donald Trump. This type of attention seeking, known popularly as “clout chasing”, reached its zenith during the Trump era.

150 Character Happiness no more

According to the Motley Fool Twitter and Facebook can recover without Trump thanks to all of the other stimulating conversation on the platform. Bear in mind that this prediction was written by a person with Facebook stock, and Mark Zuckerberg’s sister sits on The Fool’s board. The claim is that Trump, one of the biggest draws for new Twitter users, was “too toxic” for it, a mind boggling example of inverse logic. One of the main motivations of trolling is to elicit responses either from the person being trolled or from other users and create a maelstrom of back-and-forth abuse. With Trump - among many other prominent right-wing users - erased from the platform the anti-Trump trolls can continue to talk about him, but it is now impossible to troll him and will have to focus on new targets. These may include celebrities and entertainers, small users that post a politically incorrect tweet, or as is more likely to occur now others within their own social and political sphere. This is where the real weak point in Twitter’s defense may lie. Many celebrities have already deleted social media accounts either permanently or briefly in order to avoid the venom of Twitter mobs and meme creators. Now that the main target has already been taken off the platform, who will take his place?

Social media originally reached popularity owing to its ability to connect people to old friends and locate new ones according to common interests, but that era has long gone. The viciousness of the worlds of politics and entertainment has fully permeated almost every major big tech platform, with Twitter being perhaps the best example. Ultimately Twitter, like any other commercial enterprise, does not need merely stability of its customer base in order to succeed, it needs growth. For that to happen, Americans must see a reason to start using these platforms notwithstanding much more draconian speech codes than during their initial growth.

The likelihood of this happening is increasingly unlikely, precisely because Twitter remains so politicized regardless of whether Trump remains a user or not. According to a Pew Research study published in 2020, 64% of Americans see social media as negatively affecting the state of the nation. This number includes a supermajority of Republicans (78%) and a majority of Democrats (53%). When broken down, Republicans consistently find it negative across age groups. Democrats aged 18-29 were the most favourable toward social media, and even then a plurality (43%) find it “mostly negative” as opposed to only (20%) that find it mostly positive, with the remainder saying neither. So if Twitter’s current model is to succeed, could it be that it depends on people desiring more toxicity, not less?