Yesterday I tweeted this:
Twitter would be so much better if we all resolved to ignore critical tweets from random people with <1000 followers.
— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) March 21, 2021
Naturally this brought accusations of elitism. Just because someone doesn't have a lot of followers doesn't mean they aren't worth listening to! You blue-check people are too full of yourselves.
Fair enough. But the context for this—which no one knew because I never mentioned it—was Twitter mobs. In particular, I had just read about a Twitter mob that had driven Emily Oster out of social media, along with yet another Twitter user who had offered up one of the now familiar reeducation camp style apologies for something she had tweeted a decade ago.
I don't even know precisely what either of these squabbles was about, but sight unseen I'd trust Oster over a Twitter mob. Her mistake, however, was that she apparently tried to engage with them under the mistaken assumption that (a) they mattered, and (b) they were arguing in good faith. Neither is generally true of Twitter mobs.
Thus my tweet. I've said this before, but I'll say it again as loudly as I can:
Twitter mobs are completely meaningless.
That's it. Are there occasional gems of criticism within the mobs? Sure. Is it worth your mental health to read the rest of the crap looking for them? Absolutely not.
Twitter is not the real world and Twitter mobs aren't real mobs. They usually start with one superspreader, if you will, and the rest of the mob is just following along without even bothering to read any of the original material. After all, why bother? It's fun to shitpost the normies, and it only takes five or ten seconds to do it.
Thus my advice: Ignore Twitter, dammit. It means nothing, and Twitter mobs mean less than nothing. Until and unless an online mob can prove that it represents something of size in the real world, it should be assumed to be nothing more than kids in their basements doing it for the lulz.
As for the mobsters with more than 1000 followers, you might need to respond briefly and calmly to them, just to have your view on record. But @butthead3487? Nah.
Lowkey, the Doug Balloon/Kevin Drum BLOGWAR is a sign our 2021 will be better than our 2020.
Just don't ignore your commenters! Oh wait...maybe take us with a grain of salt as well.
Consequently this is why I never hesitate to criticize you. You won't care and I'll have my say and anyone who reads me will think I'm right. Everybody wins!
Yo sorry, this was directed at Drum, not you!
It actually works better this way.
saw the tweet, saw the backlash, and thought "this simply proves kevin's point".
Is there a difference between one person on Twitter with a thousand followers and a thousand people on Twitter with one follower each?
I only used Twitter for following things I like - primarily web development, gardening, and cooking. Generally it was great. But I found more and more people liked to inject their performative outrage into every topic. Recipes are cultural appropriation. Web development is a tool of the patriarchy. Gardening is for the privileged. People are sucking the joy out of everything just so they can get easy "likes" from other predictable followers.
I like following twitter feeds of my favorite sports teams like the Capitals and the Nats, also the Capital Weather Gang for breaking weather news. Other than that if a Tweet is really important I"ll find out about it eventually.
Seems like ignoring accounts with more subscribers would do me more good, honestly.
I think an even more profound way to ignore Twitter is to literally ignore it by not having a Twitter account and not participating in it at all.
AMEN!!!
I don't have an account either. I can read twitter without having an account, I can google to find stuff that interests me. Mostly I only read the feeds of sports teams for snarky/funny sports content or news about the teams.
I shake my head at people with 100,000s of followers who decide to take on some critic with 180 followers. If they said something wrong and stupid, let them continue in obscurity. Also, by aiming fire at a small-tweeter, when you're a bigshot, you are being a bully. Even if you're right and they're wrong, it's vicious to turn your mob against them.
I don't think the particular example you picked - Twitter responses to Dr. Emily Oster's recent article in the Atlantic, which had the headline "Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma" - is a good example of a problematic 'Twitter Mob'.
1. The headline above is absolutely not true, and misleading in ways that could be problematic, in terms of outcomes with the pandemic.
2. Dr. Oster Tweeted about the article, and with her 75K followers & the high profile of the Atlantic, medical professionals on Twitter absolutely =needed= to respond to correct the misconceptions promoted by the article. You can see the responses yourself in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/ProfEmilyOster/status/1372504222248415234
Some of these responses aren't totally non-snarky, but many are. I personally find it quite surprising that Dr. Oster (and the Atlantic) would publish this article without (apparently) checking it with someone with deeper & relevant medical expertise.
2a. At least one of the Twitter responders, Dr. Tara Smith, has >100K followers, and I have found her to be a great resource for public-facing epidemiology during this pandemic. Her response:
https://twitter.com/aetiology/status/1372909298628583427
3. Dr. Oster has since apologized for the problems with this article, on her blog, here:
https://emilyoster.substack.com/p/readers-on-gas-breastfeeding-antibodies
To me, this shows a positive aspect of Twitter, the possibility of rapidly correcting a problematic message. I hope they publish a correction soon - if this article were in an academic journal, that would be a requirement.
A followup: I'd like to know where you "read about a Twitter mob that had driven Emily Oster out of social media". Dr. Oster's blog post makes it sound like her absence from social media is due to teaching responsibilities, not to being driven out.
Having to have a job to support yourself is the true cancel culture. To both the dirtbag left & CPAC right.
A bizarre development has been the emergence of websites like Twitchy where posts consist of a dozen random tweets from people nobody ever heard of, linked with a few lines of original text to explain how once again, libs have been totally owned
It's also a giant time-waster. I know people who have quit Facebook because they found it addictive and a huge time-waster. Not me. I don't find that steaming pile of coding mediocrity the least bit entertaining or interesting.
But Twitter, on the other hand...
"Ignore Twitter, dammit."
... well, we can then all look forward to Trmpr.
I've been taking Kevin's advice since before he issued it, as I've never had a Twitter account. I can only read tweets on the web when somebody links to one, and I'm not allowed to retweet or write my own tweets. The more I see and hear about Twitter, the better I feel about this.
And yet, you said that on Twitter.
Just say no.