What I’m Thinking:
A quick thought for the Twitter set and the Incurably Online: quote-tweets (QTs) are a stochastic threat.
This isn’t a property unique to quote-tweets. Twitter is itself a stochastic threat. But quote-tweets most especially.
The primary issue is context collapse. I don’t even mean removing the tweet in question from the context of the surrounding thread (though it does do that), but even just taking a tweet intended for one audience and exposing it to a completely different audience causes its intended meaning to be lost.
Early in Lamar Jackson’s MVP season I saw someone cherry-pick endpoints to make him look as good as possible. I responded by cherry-picking endpoints to make Jackson look as BAD as possible.
Now, in the context of my twitter account, it should have been clear what I was doing– criticizing the process of cherry-picking endpoints by demonstrating it could be bent to whatever ends one desired. I even replied to that tweet with a link to this one, posted several months prior:
But the first tweet proved popular and was retweeted, and once it escaped my usual audience things got… weird. Some readers got that I was criticizing the process. But most who came across that tweet don’t know me as “the guy who rags on discretionary endpoints” and thought I was criticizing Lamar Jackson himself.
The tweet eventually got retweeted by a well-known account that has frequently opined that the media is (to quote Rush Limbaugh) “very desirous that a black quarterback do well”. And suddenly a nontrivial percentage of the audience reading that tweet assumed I was a racist and started attacking me for it. And another nontrivial percentage of the audience reading that tweet… assumed I was a racist and started confiding that they were a fellow traveler.
I was just dealing with a high volume of plain-jane retweets and it was enough to collapse all context and make my mentions super weird. I’m not saying I suffered harm; at worst I’d say the experience was surreal. But that’s retweets; quote tweets take that process and supercharge it.
Who is a QT for? Certainly not the person being quote-tweeted. If you had something to say to them you could just say it to them in their mentions or (preferably) their DMs. Instead, quote-tweets are intended to send a message to your followers, and if the QT is critical, that message is often “this person is wrong”, which on the internet is often misconstrued as “this person is bad”.
“Stochastic terrorism” refers to the process of using mass communication to incite acts of violence that are probable in the aggregate but individually unpredictable. When the Supreme Leader of Iran declared fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses, it became highly likely that someone would act upon that declaration, even if each individual person who heard it was overwhelmingly likely to not act on that declaration.
I’m not going to play the “words are violence” game, because words are not violence. The key aspect of violence is its physicality and injuriousness. But I’m also not going to say that words are harmless. Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can hurt me, too.
And every time you QT someone in a negative manner you run the risk of inciting an avalanche of hurtful words. Whether you intend it that way or not, it’s a threat, albeit a stochastic one. The vast majority of the time nothing will come of it. On rare occasions, you’ll ruin someone’s day. On extraordinarily rare occasions, you’ll ruin someone’s life.
(That framing is the New York Times’, not mine; from what I’ve heard Justine Sacco’s life has recovered from her day as Twitter’s main character, which I note here more to offer hope for those whose situations seem hopeless than to minimize the cruelty inflicted upon her via stochastic threat.)
Maybe you think you’re a nobody, maybe you think you’re punching up. A friend shared with me a story of how he, a guy with <300 twitter followers, accidentally ruined someone’s day. The power-law nature of social media interaction means when things break, they break bad.
I’m not trying to catastrophize here. Someone who said something dumb on the internet suffered a large, uncomfortable pile-on and felt he had to resort to mass-blocking everyone involved in order to regain some semblance of equilibrium. I’m sure he’s totally fine, it was a bad day, we’ve all had them.
My point is just to be aware that any time you publicly call out someone like that you should know that “ruining their day” is pretty solidly within the range of possible outcomes. Maybe you’re okay with that, maybe you think that that’s an acceptable risk given the stakes (a facile conclusion when it’s not your mental equilibrium on the table, but still).
Maybe you even think that “ruining someone’s day” is the optimal outcome, all things considered.
I’m not telling you how you should feel, and I’m definitely not casting stones. I’ve done plenty of public dunkings on social media. It’s a good thing I didn’t have access during my intemperate youth or things would have been much worse. (Because I was an asshole.)
I’m not even going to “great power, great responsibility” you or push any other hoary platitude (“do unto others…”). How gauche, how patronizing. Everyone involved here is an adult. (I hope. Please be nice to kids.)
But amplifying bad takes on social media has potential costs for those whose takes are being amplified, and I just want to bring a degree of intentionality to the process.
What I’m Reading:
“My Mother’s Catfish Stew” — a poignant essay on how what we eat becomes a part of who we are.
What I’m Working On:
Just completed: “How to Trade in Inactive Leagues“, a rundown of the processes that allow me to make up a disproportionate share of the trade volume in leagues that are often considered “inactive”.
On deck: “How to Be Wrong”, a primer on finding out which of your beliefs are wrong so you can hopefully replace them with beliefs that are right.
In case you missed it, I’ve also been doing a weekly podcast with Matt Waldman of the Rookie Scouting Portfolio. You can find back episodes here, new episodes go live every Thursday afternoon.