Article: Why Twitter Is Insane

Hello everyone. Before diving into this topic, I've got to clarify something. I am reading some of the pieces that I'm producing, and that means that these are things that I wrote. The reason I'm doing that rather than speaking extemporaneously is because now and then, if I'm pushing myself to the limits of my conceptual ability, then I have to choose my words with the undue care that writing allows. I suppose that has the disadvantage that's associated with reading something rather than speaking off the cuff, but the advantage of precision and care.

So today, I'm going to talk. I'm going to read a piece that I entitled “Why Twitter is Insane.” It is often said that social media is driving us out of our minds, individually and collectively. Is this true? And if so, how and why? The eminent social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently wrote a hard-hitting article showing that use of certain forms of social media, particularly by girls just entering adolescence, was directly and causally associated with higher rates of depression and depression-related symptoms since the early to mid-2010s.

I had been thinking along broadly similar lines, particularly with regard to Twitter and how its incentives are structured compared to those that characterize healthy human interactions. The extent of its harmful pathology has recently been brought home to me as a consequence of those deliberations.

A thought experiment: Imagine, for example, that you learned a particular pattern of communication in your family, one that when used on others triggered a passive or even outright aggressive resistance. By definition, the unusual method of communication you had been taught, one that did not generalize well to the broader social environment, would characterize you, at least as far as society is concerned, as insane.

Now, let's ask: How does Twitter, like that family, differ from the real world in how it requires us to communicate with each other? How does it make us too insane? The first way is in the manner in which it bypasses the traditional means for measuring the quality of communication in the real world. High-volume communication is extremely costly, requiring both hard-to-establish credibility—why otherwise would large numbers of people want to read or listen to you?—and access to the wealth necessary for such communication, either directly through personal accumulation or by proxy, such as a contractual arrangement with a publishing house.

Twitter casts these limitations asunder. The consequence of this demolition of potentially vital regulation is multiplied by the fact that Twitter provides universal access to each of its users' hard-won personal networks. The second way is how anyone, regardless of competence or social status, can comment to anyone else's entire network of followers merely by commenting on something the latter posted. That same commenter, therefore, can access all those who have chosen to follow not them, but the target of their say, insult, and derision, without having demonstrated any of the competence necessary to have attracted such attention on their own.

This democratization of communication enables a parasitism completely divorced from competence. It massively inflates noise relative to signal, bypassing all the screening mechanisms that have been so painstakingly developed to shield us from incessant racket in the real world. The third way Twitter breaks the norms of standard human interaction is the zero cost and even potential benefit it imposes on those who engage in flagrant ethical misconduct. It facilitates the implied moral elevation that accrues to the accuser who adopts the position of virtuous judge merely by formulating an accusation, however vague, ill-founded, and scurrilous.

In the same vein, there is no cost for insults, ad hominem attacks, and provocative statements. Incitement, in other words, people can hide behind their anonymity as well and act, if possible, even more brazenly. Too often, therefore, the median stimulates a reactive rage as it denies even to competent users two of the main privileges traditionally granted to them: the presumption of innocence and the right and ability to engage in effective self-defense. The mob can say anything at all about you or your thoughts online, despite your hard-earned reputation, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Any member of what can far too easily become a mob can level any accusation, no matter how slanderous against anyone at all for any reason, and there is little or nothing that the target can do in response. Perhaps most worrisome of all is the fact that this incited rage bleeds over into the real world. All the impotent anger generated is externalized away from the social network and dispersed. Thus, the ambient emotional temperature of general society is raised degree by degree to the boiling point.

Malignant narcissism: we know this instinctively, but it would be easy to test. An ambitious PhD student, case one's listening, could expose one group to Twitter for half an hour, another randomly established to another social media network, and a third, if desired, to a reading task. All study participants could then be assigned, say, a competitive aggression research task to determine if Twitter exposure heightens the proclivity to respond in kind with punishment to provocation.

I believe that Twitter's reward structure, even more than Facebook's, incentivizes malignant narcissism. It enables and benefits free riding, prioritizes psychopathic motivation, and it garners disproportionate attention in doing so, capitalizing on the attractiveness of outrageous behavior while externalizing all the associated and inevitable costs to the innocent broader society. This is the psychological equivalent of the tragedy of the commons, the psychological equivalent to pollution of the air we all breathe.

I recently spoke about all this to the author of the article I mentioned previously, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and on the same email string to Steven Pinker, the eminent cognitive psychologist. How did my psychologist colleagues react? Haidt noted that Twitter indeed cuts the link between “competence or value creation” and prestige/reward. Pinker likewise observed, “the contrast between Twitter and face-to-face communication is profound. I have been astounded at how some of my students and younger colleagues think nothing of spitting utterly gratuitous and unjustified snark at respected figures in their fields. I have to remind them that they may meet these figures at a conference someday or that they might be on their tenure or grant review committees.

The transition from meetings to Zoom in the past two years may have exacerbated this, but I suspect the main enabler is the sense that their reference group is their Twitter same-age peers and that they don't have cues reminding them they're part of a multi-generational community.” Pinker added, “there also seems to be a dynamic of weaponizing social justice, so that as our society legitimately expands rights for Black people, women, gay people, and transgender people, it simultaneously creates weapons for sociocultural warfare, handing aggressive professionals a moralistic cudgel with which they can demonize their competitors. In this case, destructive trolling could also be a side effect of moral progress.”

Note that this would be consistent with the appeal of moralistic mobbing among younger generations. In status competitions with their seniors, they are disadvantaged along every dimension but one: claimed moral superiority. How much are our social media networks—these massively broad-scale social experiments conducted with radically insufficient knowledge of the underlying psychological dynamics—incentivizing narcissism? An idea that particularly appealed to Dr. Haidt.

And how much is too much? Here's an uncomfortable conclusion: It does not take that many free riders, or criminals, or people who simply just don't care and who would just as soon see everything burn to radically destabilize complex social organizations. I spoke recently with the journalist Andy Ngo about the anarchist group Antifa, for example. After being informed by some Democrats I was corresponding with that this group Antifa didn't really exist, I didn't know what they meant until I asked Andy how many truly active Antifa cells he thought existed in the U.S. and how many active full-time equivalent members each cell might have.

He thought 40 cells with 20 members each. That's 800. All that damage from 800 anarchists? That's the Pareto principle: a small number of agents in any organization or its equivalent pull all the weight. It's worth remembering that one percent of the U.S. population accounts for two-thirds of all violent crime and that a minority of that one percent are repeat offenders exacerbating polarization.

Have we built so-called communication systems that are capable of destabilizing our entire society? Haidt believes that it was the mere introduction of the retweet and like buttons that facilitated the tit-for-tat sharing of emotionally triggering content, particularly that capable of generating outrage. If a tech innovation that small can exacerbate polarization on a societal scale, how much disruption can these communication technologies, taken as a whole, create? Enough to bring us down?

The mental health data certainly indicate that a major toll has already been taken on female adolescents. What about the rest of us? What about our social institutions? It seems clear that the potential psychological and sociological harm engendered by the increasingly monopolistic communication enterprises engaging our society are such that we should at least consider a push to conduct research on the matter, with an eye to conceptualizing, designing, and improving social media sharing platforms that aren't prima facie insane and contagiously so.

We must do so before our new and, in some ways, miraculous mass communication systems pollute the social world beyond repair.