How Twitter Has Colonized and Ruined Media

Twitter is one of the major tools of the revolutionaries. As Hannan points out, it basically controls mainline media.

From the Washington Examiner

By Dan Hannan

Like most people who use it, I have a complex and infuriating relationship with Twitter. It is a valuable source of information. It has put me in touch with fascinating people, some of whom have become real-life friends. It lets me crowdsource questions and discover the unlikeliest facts.

Yet, I frequently come away feeling dirtier. Twitter’s business model depends upon its users being priggish, censorious, and bellicose. It works because people take pleasure in correcting others — especially when they can do so as part of a self-righteous mob. In such a climate, nuance, accuracy, and generosity are lost. The slightest slip of the tongue is pounced upon. The worst construction is put on innocent statements. The vilest motives are inferred.

The worst of it is how easily you can find yourself being dragged in — driven to correct a falsehood, to slap down someone who has crossed you, or to add your voice needlessly to an already loud chorus. More than once, I have thought of George Orwell’s description of the Two Minutes Hate:

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

I periodically take time off Twitter, consciously detoxing. If we define addiction as lusting after things that are bad for us, social media are addictive in an especially dangerous way. We can cut out alcohol or tobacco or gambling, but if we are interested in news and current affairs, it is harder to live without these programs, even knowing that they are deliberately designed to trigger the dopamine hits that drive compulsive behavior.

The trouble is, we can’t escape Twitter simply by turning it off — not anymore. For it has now colonized the older media, infecting them with its aggressive, assertive, and unsubstantiated style.

When it first became popular a decade or so ago, Twitter was hailed as an antidote to monolithic broadcasters and newspapers. It was supposed to be snappier but also more heterodox, a collection of diverse and eclectic thoughts. Instead, the two forms of media have converged. First, Twitter began to withhold its checkmark from controversial public figures — meaning that the symbol became a sign of approval rather than simply a verification of identity. Then, it started banning fringe conservatives.

Far more alarming, though, is what we might call the Twitterization of the traditional media. For me, the single most powerful passage in Bari Weiss’s devastating letter of resignation from the New York Times was this one:

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.

Indeed, and not only the New York Times. We see the same phenomenon across the English-speaking world, as newspapers and TV shows become more partisan, more strident, more clickbaity. To take a trivial but typical example, the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, recently released the first photographs of himself with his 11-week-old son, Wilfred. Immediately and inevitably, Twitter loons fell upon the image, claiming that it was doctored and suggesting that the whole birth had somehow been faked for political advantage. And it did not stop there: Newspapers, under the guise of reporting what was happening on Twitter, aired the same bizarre conspiracy theory. Any notion that old-fashioned editors were there to filter out this kind of nonsense has vanished.

A couple of weeks ago, the BBC’s director of editorial standards admitted to a parliamentary committee that some of the corporation’s journalists (who, being state-funded, are theoretically obliged to be unbiased) had become “addicted to Twitter” and that impartiality had gone out of the window as a result of their longing to “go viral.”

We see the effect all around us. A handful of people have taken refuge in long-form articles and specialist publications — which, like book clubs, have revived as an antidote to the trivial, truncated tone of the age. But many more — let’s not kid ourselves — are getting exactly what they want: opinion presented as fact, stories tailored to suit short attention spans, deliberate confirmation bias, news that offers instant gratification rather than analysis. We can’t escape Twitter anymore. It has won.