Twitter is a Terrible Platform

First of all, know who you are talking to on Twitter - install Soupcan. Most transphobes are terrible people otherwise. This extension highlights them in red.

Edit (2024.06.17): it just keeps getting yet a magnitude worse. It is astounding really. I don’t have much to add, but I thought I should note this here.

Edit (2023.09.08): to no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to what kind of person Elon Musk is, basically everything here has gotten a magnitude worse.

Twitter is Bad for Discourse

I’m writing this to encourage anyone reading to be cautious around ambiguous discourse on Twitter. If you see someone make unambiguously bigoted statements then those should still be called out. Please assume good faith.

I won’t be mentioning any names because they’re honestly not important.

I don’t think anyone in particular in what I’m describing did anything exceptionally bad, this is more about Twitter as a platform and what it facilitates.

The Case

I’d like to talk about this (now deleted) tweet from a leftist content creator and the reactions it got:

If your primary enemy is “breadtubers” or content creator X then you’re not really attacking anyone who wields any actual power.

You just hate an e-celeb. In which case fair dues but it’s not exactly revolutionary action

There are in my opinion three statements here and I’d like to explore how this went wrong in the discourse.

Don’t make “breadtubers” your primary enemy.
These “breadtubers” don’t hold “actual power”.
Attacking e-celebs is not revolutionary action, but you can still do it.

If you manage to figure who was involved in this, please leave everyone alone. Do not harass anyone involved here.

The Readings

First of all, I want to point out that “breadtuber” is a sort of ill-defined term as it is a label that was meant to be applied to leftist anarchist-leaning content creators by viewers rather one that has been claimed by the content creators themselves. However, literally anyone can fall under the umbrella depending on who you ask and Wikipedia is even saying that Destiny (Steven Bonnell) has been described as a part of “breadtube”. In short: the label really doesn’t make any sense. This however doesn’t matter in this discussion and I’ll be using the term below.

I’d like to examine how meaning gets absolutely destroyed as the tweet above gets quote-tweeted and misread.

Point 1 was read as “don’t criticise” by several people quote tweeting this tweet. Any good-faith reading of it would assume “don’t make it your primary endevour to criticise breadtubers”. The person tweeting this knows full well that there are antagonisms between breadtubers and it specifies “primary enemy”. You can still according to the tweeter view someone who is another person that is anarchist-leaning + leftist-leaning as an enemy. One tweet even referenced a major fash-sympathetic Youtuber in a response to this tweet.

Point 2 was read as “breadtubers don’t actually hold power”. The good-faith reading of this would be “breadtubers don’t hold actual power relative to for instance elected officials” because it is pretty obvious that someone with even 10 k subscribers holds some power - just not the power to for instance escape jail-time for crimes. Could someone with 100 k subscribers harass someone off the Internet? Incite some nastiness? Absolutely. Could they defund trans healthcare in their region or get homeless people arrested? Not so much. A subscriber matters much less than a vote in our current systems.

Point 3 was generally not remarked upon and is hence in my opinion not that important to what we’re discussing.

I also observed a tweet that made three points that they thought were incompatible with the original tweet (including “having an audience is power”) to which the content creator responded “I agree” in a reply. I think it is fair to say the original tweet has been misread.

The Problems and How Twitter makes it Worse

The context of the tweet is a problem.

The original tweet wasn’t addressed to anyone and thus ends up being about a nebulous “they” (please note that this is different from when a conspiracy theorist talks about “them”).

Who is this “they” in this context? Who is this tweet about? Is it leftist critics of content creator A or is it bad-faith smearers of content creator B? Who knows. This tweet relates to the tweeter’s subjective experience of an unspecified situation that probably isn’t even representative of the people they think they’re addressing as a whole.

This particular fault lies somewhat with the creator of the tweet, but Twitter makes this worse. The format of Twitter forces your opinions into small blocks of 280 characters and discussions end up in many different places that are impossible to follow - quote tweets, responses, screencaps. This impacts how you write, what you prioritise, and what you will provide in terms of references. If you add an addendum to your tweet, such as clarifying regarding point 1 - that you actually think it is 100% fair to view a breadtuber as an enemy, the people who have already quote tweeted you may never even see it or perhaps view it as you trying to explain away the bad thing you said rather than clarifying as it would be seen on any other platform or in a conversation in real life. This is a problem that Twitter helps create due to Twitter not being in any way threaded. Things are also easier to take out of context (even accidentally!), you may clarify, people might see just the quote tweets and not even investigate the original tweet and any possible clarifications underneath.

Furthermore, the discussion-spread and non-channeled way of discussion leads to some other problems. One big advantage of platforms that let you chat with others in real-time is that you can respond to questions or skip over already known things. On Twitter, you may err on the side of caution and accidentally overexplain something which may come off as condescending or skip over something due to space constraints that you thought was already widely known that someone else thought you absolutely should mention.

I think it is also somewhat easy to accidentally poison the well. If the first thing you see of the tweet we’re using as an example is someone quote-tweeting it and misreading a point, it becomes much easier to misread the tweet the same way - especially if the original tweet is from someone you dislike and the person quote-tweeting it is someone you like.

All of this combines to create a situation where context is easily lost, clarifications are difficult, threads end up either clunky from overexplaining or missing information others feel is critical and ambiguity is difficult to avoid - this makes it difficult to have an actual discussion on this medium.

What Should You do about this?

The following applies to everyone: my recommendation is to stay away from any potentially controversial ambiguous statements or point out how it is ambiguous and ask what the person in question meant. Even if it is someone who you otherwise dislike, you should still attempt a good faith reading of what’s being said and perhaps ask for clarification rather than quote tweeting a dunk.

If you are a content creator, avoid Twitter for anything but promoting your videos and dealing with unambiguous topics. If you wish to address something where the context can be hard to discern for others or can be read in any number of ways: make a TwitLonger, a Medium post, or a video and make sure to clarify things.

If a tweet has been qoute tweeted, make sure to also open up the original tweet.

Harassment on Twitter

The Walls are made of Paper

When you click that “Tweet”-button on Twitter, the world can now see your tweet and that’s not always a good thing. Say you are a marginalised person who is venting about the shit you’re facing in the bottle cap collector community. You tweet “What’s up with the straights in the BCC?” because some guy kept hitting on you despite you very clearly stating you’re not interested, you go to sleep an hour later and wake up to find that you now have 100 messages in your inbox filled with homophobic abuse because AryanBottleCapLover88 quote-tweeted you and directed his 200 k followers to your tweet with the message “why are you splitting the community?”.

Had this been any other platform, the chances of this happening are rather low. If you vent in a Discord, the members in that Discord cannot easily direct this level of harassment towards you as your messages are confined, access to you and your account are somewhat under your control and if the mods of the space where you vented detect an uptick in people trying to @ you to tell you that you’re “a degenerate” and other horrible stuff is more easily thwarted.

Your only real options are to not tweet or put your your account into private mode.

Other Technical Aspects of Twitter

`?s=XX`

If you are sharing a link, make sure to trim away the last part of the URL (if it exists) that says ?s=XX where XX is a number, such as ?s=21. This gets appended when you share a link from mobile and changes how the tweet is viewed on desktop if opened. Rather than showing you the tweet + the responses undearneath, it instead shows you the tweet, parts of the thread if it is in a chain, three responses and then other suggested tweets picked by an algorithm. This is an engagement-boosting device they have made that you should be aware of.

So Wait, Why is it Like This?

Honestly, everything here loops back to one thing: engagement.

The more you click, the higher Twitter’s numbers get (including advertising revenue). Everything is geared towards tapping into emotions that make you click.

So there are two things that in my opinion are core to influencing you as an individual here:

The recommendation engine will try to guess what you makes you click something based on who it thinks you are and what you’re currently looking at. The engine knows that the content it is presenting to you has been engaging to others, but it doesn’t care in what way. Sometimes it’ll show you cute and wholesome content, other times it’ll be things that enrage you, what you feel is secondary, engagement is the point.
The format of the discussions on Twitter pushes you towards clicking through many times to watch the entire spectacle and creates avenues for extra engagement through misrepresentation and misunderstandings. I’ve seen discussions happen in chains of quote retweets and it is absolutely impossible to follow and then it is made worse by someone deleting a tweet or two.

I’d like to posit two things here:

Algorithmically driven social media content suggestions are inherently dangerous and need to be treated with care. One thing is a webstore showing you content you might be interested in, but another company in this space - Facebook - has in the past on purpose attempted to manipulate the feelings of its users. I think a quick fix here would be to make the recommendation engine only show you people you might be interested in following (which it already does) rather than tweets from around the site, but this will make the platform less engaging as you’d have to click through to view their content, so I’m not holding my breath for this one.
Quote retweets as a device need to be restricted to posts that specifically allow it. While it may be fun to dunk on obvious reactionaries or bad people with a quote tweet on your timeline, the sacrifice here is that in-community discussions by default become harder. I think that the ability to quote tweet a message should either be completely removed or by default turned off and only enabled through an explicit checking of a checkbox when posting an individual tweet (perhaps even with permission-levels so that only people you follow can QRT). While I think Mastodon is still flawed, Eugen, the main dev of the platform has stated that quoting will not be added citing toxicity reasons.

Ah Fuck, They Got Me

Yeah.

They did.

My recommendation is that you bail out as soon as possible, taking your online friends and acquaintances that are still on the platform elsewhere.

Make yourself a server/guild/group chat on literally any other platform and limit your usage of Twitter.