They're calling it cruel, evil, cancerous, offensive, violent, humiliation, torture, psychologcal warfare, an assault on mental health... Never seen a public view count referenced with this kind of language before? That'll be anatomical censorship at work.
As a multi-instrumentalist and producer with a home studio and a lifelong love of creating music, I recently found myself wondering why it's been over seven years since I last uploaded one of my devastatingly catchy works of pop genius to ye Interwebz. Then I logged into Soundcloud and was instantly reminded of the answer: mandatory public view counts.
Okay, so Soundcloud is an archetypcal audience-leech, which exploits scripting within its streams to hijack your content, on your site, and plug other people's presence on its own platform. Standard Web 2.0. But I would still use Soundcloud were it not for the site's most abusive practise of all - the reduction of creative art to a series of evaluative numbers, and the forcible parading of those evaluative numbers as a representation of the art's worth. Ultimately, its creator's worth.
For the same reason, I will not publish to YouTube. And unless Musky-boy spins a 180 on last week's view count update, I won't be hitting the Tweet button again either.
For the benefit of anyone who doesn't use Twitter, last week the platform placed an irremovable view counter onto every new Tweet. And ever since, public complaints have been continuously and consistently flooding the timelines at a rate of thousands per day.
Thousands.
Per day.
The volume of negative comments comprehensively dwarfs the number of positives.
These "features" are very deliberately integrated by people who KNOW they are inherently discriminatory and cause harm to ALREADY disadvantaged groups. Indeed the very purpose of them is to fuck with people's mental balance.
The strength of objection to these de-humanising public scoring schemes depends on a range of factors, including status, personality type and background. But reducing people, their work and even their conversation to relentless and inescapable scores, is unquestionably a form of psychological violence against anyone with self-esteem issues. There are two compound reasons for this...
- People with low self-esteem are morbidly sensitive to lack of success. So actually BROADCASTING their lack of success, by force, to the world, is psychologically torturing them. It risks real damage to their mental health. They know that, and many are outright stating the fact, on Twitter. And remember, these people are not jumping onto a trend for clout. There is no reward for reporting to 17 people that the view count is a threat to your mental health, and most of the authors of these Tweets clearly believe they're the only one on Twitter who sees the "feature" as a problem. Their expressions are 100% real.
- People with low self-esteem will by nature actually be less successful. Contrary to the myth that capitalism loves to spread, success has next to nothing to do with talent or work. It's almost entirely a product of confidence and entitlement. Which people with low self-esteem don't have. The odds of someone with genuinely low self-esteem achieving significant success are close to zero, however brilliant they are, and however hard they work.
So before we get into the elitism, gross unfairness and conceptual fucking stupidity of scoring people on absolutely everything they do, this is first and foremost a HEALTH RISK, and it must be recognised as such.
"No one is forced to use social media" is not an argument. A lot of people are directly forced to use social media. And even if they're not, social media isn't just a toy. It's often a competitive necessity, without which people's livelihoods are compromised. And let's remember that these popularity-branding "features" are not naturally-occurring. They're very deliberately integrated by people who KNOW they cause harm to ALREADY disadvantaged groups. Indeed, the very purpose of them is to fuck with people's mental balance.
Above all, let's remember that beyond pure cruelty, there is no reason at all to withhold an opt-out for any of these public measures of worth. It's perfectly simple to tweak an interface so that people who want to display these badges can do so, and those who feel oppressed by them can disable them. This is not about spoiling the dopamine-freak's fun [PDF paper landing page]. With optional display, the thrill-seekers still get their fix, but mentally-vulnerable groups are not harmed in the process.
We're talking about conversation. Something no one ever imagined should be scored, ranked or rated until these psychologically-abusive websites came along and began BRANDING the public with ratings they never asked for.
It should be mentioned at this point that amid the tidal wave of complaints on Twitter, Musk has promised to provide an off switch for the view count. But we don't know if he means he'll allow people to opt out of seeing it, or opt out of broadcasting it. If he only means the former (and knowing what he's like I suspect he does), he will solve nothing. Even if he means the latter, other mandatory badges of popularity and status remain a problem.
So what are the countless dissenting voices actually saying about Twitter's introduction of mandatory public view counts?
They're calling it cruel, evil, cancerous, offensive, violent, humiliation, torture, psychologcal warfare, an assault on mental health... Never seen a view count referenced with this kind of language before? That'll be anatomical censorship at work.
ANATOMICAL CENSORSHIP?
Anatomical censorship is the suppression of voices by structural design. Censorship that is a property of a system's anatomy. Twitter perfectly illustrates censorship by structural design. Because of the way the platform is built, people with low status are not inherently visible. If they want their views to become visible, they have to proxy them through visible people with higher status. But people with higher status will refuse to proxy the views of people with low status if they themselves can be negatively affected by those views. Perhaps, for example, the higher status person stands to lose a privilege.
This is precisely what happens when it comes to complaints about mandatory public scoring. High status users do not want their popularity badges to be taken away, and that's not just down to ego.
A badge that says "This user is popular" also carries tangible competitive advantage. It's worth hard cash. It's a career-driver. High status users naturally want to keep these advantages, without which their lives would be very considerably harder. If they had to compete 100% on merit with users of all statuses, effectively starting on a level playing field with every new Tweet they posted, they would quickly find themselves losing reach, losing attention and losing work/money. They know that.
This is why Twitter's legacy blue-tick elite spent weeks hyperventilating after Elon Musk announced he would strip them of their precious status symbol. They WANT a system that unfairly advantages them. They WANT a 75 yard head start for every hundred they run - which is essentially what they're getting.
So it's extremely difficult for low-status users, who due to the anatomy of Twitter are near invisible, to find a visible channel for their complaints on this particular issue. Influencer dude, who heavily relies on all his account's marques of success to drive confidence in his brand, and who enjoys that 75 yard head start per hundred yards of track, is not gonna support a message that protests his advantages.
Even if the complaints only ask for the badges to be made optional, Joe Influencer is thinking:
"But what if they make status-badging optional and the site works better without it? Are they then gonna take my badges away?"
So even though there are countless expressions of objection, they're not disseminated with any authority or reach. They're silenced through their incompatibility with the desires of the opinion-proxies. That's anatomical censorship.
This type of censorship - heavily intertwined with elitism - prevents a vast range of pressing minority concerns from ever seeing daylight. Indeed, the stranglehold of status on the path to visibility is so tight that the most voiceless people don't see any point in expressing their concerns in the first place. It's an ethical scandal that virtually no one with power has an incentive to address. Least of all the tech oligarchs, who directly profit from it. And second least of all democratic governments, whose closet mantra says:
"It is not prudent for the creator of suffering to give voice to the sufferer."
HELP THE PRIVILEGED, PUNISH THE DISENFRANCHISED
Popularity-scoring, be it a view count, followers total, 'like' count or whatever else, is unfair and profoundly elitist in effect. It handicaps the people who most need a break, whilst further advantaging the privileged.
If you're publicly scoring people on their conversational contributions, but one person in the convo has twenty times the audience volume as someone else, how can the scores ever reflect anything but privilege and disadvantage?
Go to Twitter and search the phrase: "You have 2 followers", or "You have two followers". Use the quotes so you only surface Tweets with those exact phrases. What you'll find is a wall of shaming. Nothing else. Just shaming. And that is exactly the purpose of FORCING the display of followers on any online platform. To shame people with low counts, subtract credibility from them, and psychologically batter them into taking an action which will benefit the network. Ideally, in this case, refer their real-life friends. And whilst Mastodon is currently getting a lot of applause, it's just as guilty of this unnecessary shaming as the mainstream.
What many people don't realise, is that success within these scoring systems is inextricably linked with 'real-life' status and privilege. People who are already known to be successful, will automatically get higher scores, because the public are drawn much more powerfully to success than they are to merit.
This factor is viral. Which means that when you put a score on a conversational contribution, the comment is seen not simply at face value, as a piece of conversation, but as a measure of success or failure. If it's considered successful, then in a world where people are drawn to success, it will gain more applause, giving it an even higher score, making it even more likely to get more applause. When you link these scores with visibillity - and they absolutely are linked with visibility - you get a near vertically-slanted ballpark in which privileged people will automatically have the loudest voices, and disadvantaged people will automatically be near invisible.
You could just say that's life. But it doesn't need to be, and traditional forums proved that. Unlike Twitter and other social media treadmills, trad forums were not subject to anatomical censorship. True, many of them did have scoring systems, but because the visibility of users was not based on the scores, disenfranchised voices were as loud as privileged voices. This didn't have the skewing effect on scores that we see on Twitter, where each person in the convo is posting to a different sized audience.
This is another problem. If you're publicly scoring people on their conversational contributions, but one person in the convo has twenty times the audience volume as someone else, how can the scores ever reflect anything but privilege and disadvantage?
I saw TV personalities mouth off on those old forums, and get absolutely dismantled by complete nobodies. That couldn't happen on Twitter, because the infrastructure segregates the voice of the objector from the audience of the celeb. The celebrities and influencers gatekeep their audiences. So as a nobody, you can never challenge the Twitter elite on equal terms. It's you, alone, against them and their entire fanbase. And it can be brutal to watch.
I think most disenfranchised Twitter users do realise how high the odds are stacked against them, but usually don't realise that it's a manufactured situation, and that the platform does not have to be engineered in the monumentally elitist fashion that it is. One of the reasons there's been a grassroots uproar re the view count is that it came as a sudden change, so there was a stark 'before and after'. When people don't have that comparison, they tend not to recognise the problem as something that a human being can remedy.
WHAT WE LEARNED FROM MUSK'S VIEW COUNT DEBACLE
One of the overriding lessons this move has taught us, is that the relationship between displayed views and displayed applause can be particularly destructive and demoralising for an extremely large number of people. This has been expressed again and again. If someone's comment is seen to have been viewed 1,000 times, but 'liked' only once, there's an obvious message that 99.9% of people disapprove of the comment. That may not be anything like true. There are many reasons why people who actually liked the comment did not hit the Like button. For instance...
- They were logged out when they saw it.
- They declined to engage for competitive reasons.
- They're privacy advocates who didn't want to give Twitter and its partners any personal profiling data.
- They didn't read it. The fact that it was on their screen doesn't necessarily mean they specifically cast eyes on it.
- They didn't want to appear in the user's notifications.
- They have a policy of not 'liking' ANY Tweets, since deciding what should or shouldn't be 'liked' is mental labour.
- They're a business and they want to avoid exhibiting favouritism among customers.
Nevertheless, the message conveyed by that 1,000 to 1 ratio is one of failure. And let's remind ourselves here that we're talking about conversation. Something no one ever imagined should be scored, ranked or rated until these psychologically-abusive websites came along and began BRANDING the public with ratings they never asked for.
Another thing we learned was that many Twitter users didn't know private view counts were already available before this update. That does not suggest it was something they wanted.
We learned that even some influencers didn't want public view counts, because the ratio throws a question mark over the proportional acceptance of their takes. Is it a good take if one million people saw the Tweet, but just 32,000 liked it? Some of their fans may start to doubt the wisdom when they see a ratio like that. It's been interesting how some of these influencers have tried to distinguish 'like' and follower totals (which they want to keep) from the view count (which they don't).
We learned that Musk has definitely NOT tackled the bot problem. There are Tweets - especially in the lower reaches of Musk's own threads - with tens of thousands of 'likes' but just a few hundred views. Only way to achieve that is with tens of thousands of bots.
THE FUTURE
The fall-out from Twitter's sensationally unpopular update is still being unpacked, and one suspects that even if Musky-boy rolls back this update, a lot of the damage will remain irreversible. But I'm encouraged by the fact that the negative comments have not subsided, and I hope we'll see the conversation broaden into an eventual recognition that ALL forcible popularity badging is extremely unhealthy and worthy of preventative laws.
When I wrote The Irremovable Badge in spring 2021, I was incredibly pessimistic about the prospect of seeing any significant opposition to the insanity of turning everything everyone ever does into an assessment. I now feel people are beginning to wake up.
There's an old saying which had such a profound impact on me back in the 2000s that I built a song around it and played it when I was still gigging round the bars. I first heard the maxim uttered on 18th of December 2005 by the newscaster Anna Ford, on the TV talk show Sunday AM with Andrew Marr (yes, it was momentous enough to go in my diary, although I didn't catch the name of the person to whom Ford attributed it). The phrase?...
NO ONE EVER GREW BY BEING MEASURED.
The sad fact is that unlike the corporate lunks at whom the maxim was originally directed, most social media bosses know it's true. There's just too much profit potential in stunting the growth of human development for them to care.