Acrimony has been normalised on Twitter. Here’s the REAL route to reversing the tide.
The “emptyvist”. An activist with a lack of things to rebel against. One who pursues activism as a means of gaining attention, approval and online status rather than a means of achieving a positive result for society. Sound familiar? It will if you use Twitter, I’m sure. The short-form conversation platform is now so overrun with wildly overexaggerated “emptyvist” hate, that ToS updates just seem futile. Where does Twitter go from here?
In recent times we’ve seen the major social media platforms introducing new clauses to their Terms of Service, in a bid to stem hate speech. And nowhere has this process been more alive than on Twitter. But to date, it hasn’t worked. Although extremists are more limited in what they can and can’t say, hate has remained a pseudo-currency on Twitter. The recognition that hate is a psuedo-currency, is growing. And as more people recognise hate as a form of currency, so too grows hate itself.
There’s a trend of unnecessary, counter-productive and often heavily generalised attack which has really exploded in prevalence over the past few years. Behaviours that used to be confined to the odd few trolls, have entered the mainstream. We’ve also seen trolling migrate from the little ‘reply guy’ profile to big Twitter ‘publishers’ with large audiences. They’re trolling at scale. And no, the fact that you’re not some dude with one follower does not exempt you from the troll classification. If you post troll shit, you’re a troll.
Twitter must stop publicly branding users as either “popular” or “unpopular”. Because realistically, branding human beings is just asking for war. Creating war.
It seems like, on the cusp of the 2020s, you’re no one on Twitter unless you’re mounting some kind of attack. And even if people are faking hate to be part of “the scene”, fake hate provokes real hate, so in the end all the hate becomes real.
If making new rules can’t stop the growth of “emptyvism”, what can?…
At the root of the problem sits an overwhelming motivation. The lure of egotistical reward. In large part, egotistical reward is allocated via the Like and Retweet functions, and other similar badges of honour, such as public follower totals.
I’ve discussed the problems with reward and digital status systems before – especially with regard to the enforced public display of engagement stats. These publicly displayed “scores” don’t just honour the users who “score” highly; they also shame the users who “score” poorly. So there’s an element of carrot and stick. It’s not only: “If you get Likes and Retweets you’ll look good.” It’s also: “If you don't get Likes and Retweets you’ll look bad”. That’s a very powerful psychological motivator. It tells users: play to the crowd, or else.
From the audience’s (as opposed to the publisher’s) side of the equation, if you look at why people hit Like or RT buttons, you find a few core reasons. One is the hope of reciprocal action. Another is to make a good impression – as is the case when a business Likes potential customers’ tweets in the hope that they’ll consider buying something. Another still, is a quest to secure some other reward. Such as content, or a cash prize…
But if you set those motivations aside, both the Like and RT buttons are really serving as ‘Strongly Agree’ expressions. Unless people are trying to gain something back in return, they tend to Like or Retweet only when they think: “Yes! That represents my personal values so strongly that I will actually feel proud to publicly endorse it.”
The drive to make that endorsement comes from one of two emotions. Love, or hate. Not indifference. Not preference. Love or hate. The passionate emotions. And hate is something people are more publicly passionate about than love. Why? Because people don’t perceive that the things they love need to be changed. And therefore they don’t feel the need to publicly speak out about those things.
If Twitter hadn’t shown everyone those engagement stats, and said: “Here – this is what you can earn by hating people!”, this probably wouldn’t have happened.
If you love the countryside, you can just go to the countryside and enjoy it. You don’t need to involve Twitter in that in any way. You don’t need an influencer or a movement to help you. What you love about your life is already there.
But when people hate things, they want a solution. And when you want a solution, you have to speak out. Go to places where there are like-minded people. Exert group pressure. Social media is made for this.
The problem? Well, people routinely project their own shortcomings onto others. If lots of people don't like you, it’s probably because you’ve been a jerk. But it’s not easy to admit that – even to yourself. So people instead find the most convenient third party to blame. There are many existing ideologies that cater for that. And they’re all represented on social media.
The people who spearhead ideological movements on social media – the so-called influencers – do not prioritise truth, or resolution, or peace. They prioritise things like engagement, reach, personal status, and ultimately, product sales. They’re interested in their own prosperity. Nothing else.
And they know that high-volume engagement – the currency that drives their prosperity – does not come from taking a moderate, conciliatory approach. It comes from catering for people’s need to blame third parties for their own shortcomings. So they pander to that need…
“It’s not your fault that you’re unhappy. It’s other people’s fault, and here’s whose fault it is.”
People will always endorse this message, because it exonerates them. Sympathises with them. Agrees with them. Coddles and emotionally pampers them. The problem is that this message, especially when standardised into an ethos within an ideological movement, comes to be perceived as a fact. A polarised, and often ridiculously extreme fact. So you’ve got, for example, men blaming the entire female population for their problems, and women blaming the entire male population for their problems… And the mere existence of the two warring sides then actually validates each of the arguments. It’s like…
“Yes, men ARE the problem, because look, here’s a bunch of them demonising the entire female population, nearly all of whom they don’t even know.”
And…
“Yes, women ARE the problem, because look, here’s a bunch of them demonising the entire male population, nearly all of whom they don’t even know.”
It’s self-fulfilling. Self-polarising. Self-exacerbating. And what can that possibly achieve other than to provoke more hate?
As more people recognise hate as a form of currency, so too grows hate itself.
You may think that these wars are going to happen anyway, and that engagement tools and totals have little to do with their escalation. But that’s not true. They are fuelled by engagement tools and totals.
We can see that reflected circumstantially in the rise of engagement on Twitter. Back in 2010 or 2011, there was barely such thing as a Like or RT total with a “K” on the end. Displayed engagement totals were usually very modest – even for some celebrities. Some of the most successful non-celeb profiles back then were life-quote feeds. So that was the sort of direction in which people looking for success tended to head. There was very little “emptyvism”. You’d barely notice any at all.
Only once “emptyvist” profiles began to show very high engagement totals, did “emptyvist” activity rise. If Twitter hadn’t shown everyone those engagement stats, and said: “Here – this is what you can earn by hating people!”, this probably wouldn’t have happened. Certainly not to the extent it has.
You can see the same effect within individual profiles too. Look at the Twitter feeds of people who get involved in these hate campaigns. Not just the influencers – look at the smaller accounts. The intermediates. The people who are half way along their journey from “nobody” to “influencer”. Not only do you see a total reluctance to tweet anything but negativity towards the same group(s), all the time. If you go back far enough in their timelines you can also often find evidence of them ‘hunting’ for a successful formula…
Initially, their strategies regularly change, and their tweets exhibit variety. But then you see them hit the ‘magic’ formula that gains them the engagement they’ve been searching for, and that’s it. It’s a lightbulb moment for them. From then on, nothing changes. Every tweet a criticism, of the same people, forever. Why will they not go back to tweeting the more positive stuff they posted when they first arrived? Because it doesn't get likes or RTs. And the engagement becomes so important to them that they won’t even take a break from the repetitive hate for one single tweet.
I’ve actually felt this for myself, after a negative tweet I made about a particular ideological movement got picked up by that movement’s opposition. On the Twitter account I used, I was typically getting a few Likes per tweet. But that tweet zoomed straight into three digits of Likes, with significant Retweets. And that was just one tweet, out of the blue. It was very easy to see how the lure of that engagement draws people into these battlegrounds. Psychologically browbeating them into taking a side.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people criticising, say, men’s rights activists, or indeed feminists – when they do something that warrants criticism. The problem starts when people will only criticise one side or the other. And never do anything else. And will criticise people from a specific group to get a reward, rather than because those people actually did something that warrants criticism.
If the root of the problem is the engagement system, then the engagement system is what needs to change.
WHAT’S THE ANSWER?
We’ve seen that broadly, updates to the Terms of Service don’t work. People just loophole them. You don’t have to use hate words in order for people to understand what you mean. Male TERF Graham Linehan, for example, spent months loopholing Twitter’s misgendering rules by avoiding the use of gender pronouns altogether in cases where he felt that gendering against the individual’s wishes would be appropriate. He appears to have hopped off the TERF bandwagon now – perhaps because he finally realised he’d turned into a character from his own sitcoms. But whilst on that bandwagon he exhibited the classic influencer’s ‘tunnel vision’, in which almost every tweet had to pander to the whims of the same hate group. And Twitter’s rules against that area of hate did not stop him.
So Twitter needs to be far more radical in scaling down mass hate. It’s now out of control on the platform in the way spam was five years ago, and it’s a lot more dangerous.
What sort of measures could Twitter try? Well, if the root of the problem is the engagement system, then the engagement system is what needs to change. Likes need to go. Completely. Replace them with an enhanced stats system that can give users (but not the rest of the world) more detail about the levels of interest in what they post. That would still motivate people to tweet, and return to check up on how they’re doing. But it wouldn’t throw the focus onto the extremes of emotion in the way Likes do. It would also cut out a lot of the fake “transactional” bullshit.
What makes Likes a bigger issue than Retweets is that Likes specifically say “Yes, that’s good”. With Retweets, people can’t tell for sure whether their tweets are being relayed for good reasons or for bad. So getting 200 RTs but no Likes (known as being "ratioed") could mean “OMG, look at this pillock”. Once Likes are involved, that ambiguity disappears.
Retweets have become an integral part of Twitter’s distribution system, and I doubt the platform would survive without some means of user-initiated virality. But the RT function still needs to be re-imagined. At the least, hiding the Retweet totals, even from the person whose tweet is RT’d, would scale down the artificial impetus for people to say things they don’t really believe, in order to pleasure their egos and demonstrate “popularity”.
If you look at the wider internet, and the quest for visibility on Google Search, site admins generally compete by being useful, not by being hateful. That’s because Google has made its currency usefulness, and not “personal scores”. When you publish an article on your own website, you hope that people will recommend it, and thus push it into a visible space on the search engines, but you don’t get some public badge that tells the whole world how many people did recommend it. Twitter should be the same, with an internal, user-initiated system of recommendation that lets people pass on and discover the most useful tweets. But Twitter must stop publicly branding users as either “popular” or “unpopular”. Because realistically, branding human beings is just asking for war. Creating war.
The language surrounding a revised Retweet concept could also be changed to stress the neutrality of passing on the information or content. To indicate, as so many people stress in their bio, that “a Retweet is not an endorsement”. At present, most of the people who make that statement are doing so because they’ve got bots deciding what to RT. But it still demonstrates that people believe Retweets are endorsements. That’s something Twitter could and should change, with new language.
Major revisions to the engagement tools alone would not wipe out what’s become a deeply-entrenched culture of “hate-surfing” and "egotistical blood sport". But those revisions have to be the starting point. They would cut off the main motivation for “emptyvism” – the badge of honour. With that gone, the problem would be much easier to tackle.
If people get a reward every time they say something hateful, they're going to keep saying hateful things. That's how rewards work. Twitter has to take away the system that rewards hate. Then things will begin to improve.