3 Major Problems With Twitter

A platform with a toxic culture has led to toxic solutions

I used Twitter pretty much every day for about 5 years. But eventually, I tired of the fact that I couldn’t communicate properly on there. I got sick of the fact that every time I logged in; I was confronted with hate, misinformation, and trolls.

I decided that turning my back on Twitter was the right thing to do. I abandoned the platform long before they started banning high-profile people for saying distasteful things. I understand Twitter is trying to clean their site up, but I’m convinced that users abandoning the platform is simply a healthier solution to Twitter’s toxicity in the long term.

Here are the 3 major problems I think there are with Twitter, which has contributed to creating one of today’s most toxic online cultures.

1 — 280 characters aren’t enough

Twitter’s a space where people can say whatever’s on their minds. The caveat is that several characters to do so in are very limited. Although Twitter recently increased the character cap from 140 to 280, I’m still not persuaded that capping characters are ever a useful way to foster debate.

Because people can say what they want within Twitter’s constraints on the platform, inevitably, the most serious issues of the day end up getting raised. Many of the world’s past and present political leaders are on the platform, as well as a plethora of celebrities and public figures.

In social and political terms, Twitter functions a bit like a real public forum or a rally where a leader spouts their basic slogans at the audiences gathered in hordes to appeal for their support. Although speeches need to be short and pithy to appeal to an audience’s limited concentration and patience, they still have longer character counts than Twitter’s.

The short character count, rather than being good at cultivating constructive debate that brings about genuine change or any positive impact, instead creates perfect conditions for sloganeering and propaganda. Hence we see phenomena like the one we witnessed during the last US presidency, where serious disputes about border control mutated into xenophobic catchphrases about building a wall to keep out foreigners.

2 — There is too much trolling and hate

There are many reasons this is an issue that has affected Twitter so severely. The constraints on character usage are one big reason for this. Because space is limited, it’s not as easy for people to clarify what they mean. This makes communication difficult because of linguistic ambiguities.

Because of linguistic ambiguities, people end up misinterpreting what has been said and taking offense at statements where none was intended. Twitter is also a very reactive and impulsive place. In the real world, people are more conscious of others around them when they communicate, when compared with how people communicate in digital spaces.

When we communicate in person, we are conscious of those physically around us. We are also self-conscious about how we as people come across in the flesh. This makes us more careful and deliberate about moderating how we interact with others in person than we are online.

Digital communication is more impersonal than communicating with people in the flesh. When someone gets offended by something online, there are therefore fewer barriers to reactions of indignation and aggression, because people are less sensitive to how they are being perceived by the people around them. This helps create hateful spaces, as people censor themselves less.

Twitter is the worst example of a hateful space I have ever encountered, probably anywhere in my life, as well as online. That tweets are so short, that the content posted there is often very political, and that all communication is online and can easily be anonymous, are factors that combine for a very overemotional, explosive, toxic, environment.

3 — There is too much editorial censorship

Because of the amount of hate, trolling, misinformation, and fake news on Twitter and other social media platforms, these companies have censored content and remove individuals from their services.

Social media platforms are now trying to solve problems that they have helped create in ways that raise even more problems. Social media spaces online should not be lawless spaces. Laws against hate speech and verbal abuse should be applied online, just as they are in person.

People who make these sorts of viciously abusive comments that transgress hate speech and verbal abuse laws should not only be banned from the platforms, but they should be prosecuted too. People who are said by Twitter to have incited lawlessness should be warned first, and that they have been warned must be made very clear to them. The rules must be explicit.

Fake news and rules about misinformation prove more of a minefield. By removing, flagging, and censoring posts and profiles they consider constitutive of fake news and misinformation, Twitter (and Facebook) have therefore set precedents where companies that are funded by private wealth can arbitrate what is publicly accepted as truth.

So far, the uses of this new censoriousness have been put to have been seemingly innocuous, flagging content which most people agree should be regulated, such as content that denies basic climate science and provides misinformation about coronavirus. However, it is easy to understand how some see these events as Orwellian steps towards a dystopian future, where the constraints of what we are able to think are predetermined by agents who hold authority, power, and wealth in our societies.

Conclusion

Out of all the popular social media platforms out there today, Twitter poses some of the most significant social and political challenges.

It has quickly become increasingly infested with hate, trolls, and misinformation. These facts have led to the company deploying aggressive strategies to push back against the abuses they have witnessed on their platform, strategies which include bans and censorship.

It will be interesting to see whether Twitter can haul itself out of the hole it has dug for itself, to turn its space into an area that provides its users with some constructive value.

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