Twitter still sucks

I’ve been on a bit of a tear lately about social media and our societal reliance upon it as a means of public discourse and obtaining news.  A particular target for me is Twitter–as it has been in past–and one news story this week just added fuel to my own personal fire.

I refer to the coverage of the YouTube shooter, a troubled woman named Nasim Aghdam, who shot and wounded three people before killing herself at the headquarters of the tech darling.  Charlie Warzel and Jane Lytvynenko of BuzzFeed collaborated on an interesting thinkpiece on how the news first broke and what developed thereafter.  Warzel and Lytvynenko perhaps accurately describe Twitter as “the beating heart of breaking news,” given its immediacy and the easy ability it gives users to broadcast information in real-time.  But those same attributes are also Twitter’s biggest flaw.

General public knowledge of Ms. Aghdam’s shooting started with a tweet from Vadim Lavrusik, a YouTube product manager, who tweeted:  “Active shooter at YouTube HQ. Heard shots and saw people running while at my desk. Now barricaded inside a room with coworkers.”  But it wasn’t long before the trolls took over–4chan hoaxers treating the whole situation as a joke, those who see a political or religious motivation in everything, claims that the shooter was a Donald Trump supporter or a Donald Trump hater, exaggerated estimates of victims and death tolls, etc., etc.  Anyone trying to separate the wheat from the chaff was left with little of the former and a whole lot of the latter to sort through.  As Warzel and Lytvynenko observe, the commentators’ roles are largely defined, the narrative largely set.

For trained journalists like Warzel and Lytvynenko, Twitter may yet be a useful resource because they are used to questioning the information they receive.  As their piece observes:  “Journalists have always been endeared to Twitter in part because it mimics the process and chaos of reporting, forcing one to navigate a deluge of source material, vetted reporting, commentary, and bullshit. For those reasons, Twitter also does a great job of laying bare the news-gathering process, which can be exhilarating and attractive to bystanders.”  The trouble, as Ms. Aghdam’s rampage and the commentary surrounding it makes clear, is that many Twitter users–and the public, in general–have lousy bullshit detectors.

That doesn’t mean that Twitter is useless.  As Warzel and Lytvynenko observe, “Online, Twitter has no rival for real-time news. It is the best place to collectively take in a sporting event or awards show or to endlessly discuss a Trump scoop.”  In other words, Twitter is the best source to learn about meaningless crap.  Give it a staged, choreographed event to report or one where the rules are clearly defined–in short, something trivial–and Twitter does fine.  But put Twitter in the context of real-world, real-time events where the outcomes matter and lives are potentially at stake, and it is worse than no information, at all.  Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.  Twitter aids the flight, more than anything.  Yet, ironically, it has now “re-branded” itself as a “news” app–one that takes no responsibility for presenting actual “news.”  That Twitter forms any part of our serious public discourse is genuinely frightening.