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.