(Reposted from Facebook)

The chaos over on Twitter these past two days, especially those who are clutching their pearls over the “death of the public sphere” has me both amused and concerned. Twitter (and this hellsite as well) is a terrible communication medium, and we should be lauding its demise (or at least its fall from grace). Consider that, as a communications medium, a letter dropped in the mail is more reliable. Twitter has no guarantee of readership. I tweet something, and there’s no way to know if 1 or 1 million people will read it. An opaque algorithm determines who sees it. And by opaque, I mean some for-profit corporation who is trying to maximize engagement/profit, which almost certainly doesn’t have your best interests in mind is deciding what you see. It’s a mistake to think that what’s popular/trending on twitter is what is most concerning for people. But that’s the great trick. We go there to see what the temperature is. How interesting that it’s always hot? In short: you are trusting hidden and likely malicious actors to decide what’s worth paying attention to.
 
Consider too that tweets are limited to 240 characters. Yes, you can create threads. But the number of multi-tweet threads that go “viral” compared to the number of standalone tweets that do suggest that the 240 character limit is just that: limiting. Short, pithy, punchy statements that can fit in 240 words are good for stump speeches and harangues, but they’re not suited to the kind of well-thought out, extended discourse that’s necessary for a functioning democracy. (Consider that this post would be dozens of tweets long by now. How many would have stuck with me for this long?)
 
Some people have done exceptionally well on twitter. They do so because they’ve gotten good at determining what twitter wants: aggressive engagement. Yes, engagement can be a good thing, for example being engaged in democracy. But what the algorithms want to maximize is your engagement not with democracy, but with the site itself. It’s usually not tweets that share the sublime beauty of a sunrise that go viral, but ones that are angry about something. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be angry — there’s lots of things to be angry about — but when your feed is a million angry tweets of people not just upset and furious, but wanting you to be upset and furious too so you can engage with them, the end result for many is emotional withdrawal. We doom scroll, feeling helpless. Our empathy wanes. We like and retweet this or that tweet, thinking we are helping “raise awareness.” But the only thing we are doing is raising twitter’s quarterly profit. The most popular twitter users have recognized that getting you upset means getting you engaged. They have made twitter’s desires their desires, and not the other way around.
 
Their mistake (and ours) is thinking that twitter represents a “public space” in any capacity. True, it’s one of the most popular communication sites on the planet. But a true public space would allow for extended, sustained discourse on a topic, and not clip it to 240 words. A true public space would not use opaque algorithms to determine what we see. A true public space would not try to maximize destructive human emotions for profit. Twitter is none of those things, and the people mourning the death of the “public space” have been hoodwinked.
 
We can do better. Humanity deserves better.