HOW TWITTER DESTROYED POLITICS
Here’s the biggest problem, though... As Twitter continues its descent into pointless hysteria and turns the Internet into one big fever swamp, a sufficient number of people in authority continue in the delusion that what happens there tells us something about politics in the real – which is to say, non-Twitter – world. The delusion carries the danger of being actualized and self-fulfilling. Consider the case of the field of Democratic presidential candidates. Most of them – or their operatives – act as though the enthusiasms and half-baked prejudices they see expressed on Twitter somehow reflect the views of normal Democrats. Polls show that this simply isn’t true – Democratic voters, even in primaries, are more mainstream than their counterparts on Twitter. Abolishing ICE, prosecuting Trump, opening borders, eliminating private health insurance: Democratic candidates take these as popular and winning policy positions because, at least in part, they saw ‘em on Twitter. Such is the distorting power of social media. Politics has always been subject to misfires and misreadings of the popular mood... That’s why some candidates win and others lose. But Twitter has done something new. It has taken the center and pushed it to the margins, while the extremists roll in to fill the empty space and seize the nation’s attention. Most of us find politics revolting as a result. I suppose it’s possible that politics was like this all along, and it took a new technology to expose the plain truth. If that’s the case, watch for the Luddite party to make a long-overdue comeback.
gullible, simply by virtue of being published, a tweet can look as authoritative as a story on the front page of the New York Times (which has its own troubles spreading misinformation). This is a problem for social media generally, of course, from Pinterest to Instagram to the Russian intelligence agencies’ favorite outlet, Facebook. What techno-utopians once touted as the great revolutionary advance of social media – that it would flatten every barrier to entry in the worldwide marketplace of communication and ideas – may also prove to be its undoing, as Fake News, by fits and starts, slowly pushes out the real thing, in a perverse expression of Gresham’s law. Given the tone of bitterness and rancor it encourages, and its ongoing failure to distinguish real news from bogus propaganda, Twitter, along with other social media, is increasingly the sandbox of cranks, hysterics, and preening exhibitionists. Sure, Twitter has the potential to place before a user a much wider variety of views than we might otherwise see. And yet, as a pair of sociologists who have taken on the sad duty of cataloguing the evolution of online controversies put it, “Twitter is exposing people to multiple diverse points of view but ... the medium is insufficient for reasoned discourse and debate, instead privileging haste and emotion.” (I first heard about this study in The Smallest Minority , an actual book with, like, pages and everything, by the writer and reformed Twitter user Kevin Williamson.)
Andrew Ferguson is the author of Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course on Getting His Kid Into College . He is a former speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush and was one of the founding editors of The Weekly Standard.
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August 2019
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