On What Twitter Is & Why I’m Fine With Never Coming Back

 

What Twitter Is & Why I’m Fine With Never Coming Back

 

So obviously in light of my “new normal” situation as an independent analyst trying to leverage multiple websites to replace Twitter as my primary method of getting eyes on my work, I do in fact still have to watch Twitter. Specifically, I’m forced to repeatedly check to make sure folks are sharing and talking about my new articles; such as they have been recently* – getting suspended from Twitter is apparently a time consuming process when you’re lazy and have repeatedly neglected your other outlets for talking to readers.

As part of this humiliating process (I mean, I’m name and handle searching myself from an incognito window; this is brutal) however, I have naturally come across a number of anguished posts about my absence from my genuine friends and most dedicated readers. I cannot in good conscience say that I’m not touched by this outpouring of emotion, and yes a part of me does indeed feel bad enough to want to create a new account and start the cycle all over again. I think however it’s important to note here that this is in fact a vicious and predictable cycle; I join Twitter, I start posting, the Twitter algorithms keep me from re-connecting with all of my friends and readers for several months but eventually, some popular blue check-mark verified accounts start retweeting me, and my follower count creeps past four thousand. At that point, I’ve since come to realize I’m already doomed and I try to be on my best behavior but within a month or two at best, someone with pull at Twitter notices I’m back and influential again – then bam, my account is suspended; typically at a rather inopportune time as it turns out.

This is all very frustrating in and of itself, but if it were truly my only reason for not returning to Twitter, I might agree with those folks who seem to feel that I’ve abandoned them, over what amounts to a petty spat over what is and isn’t “civil conduct” with Jack and his platform. After all, the elephant in the room here is seemingly my inability to avoid swearing at numpties and telling them to get in the f*cking sea; although let us at least be honest with each other here about how Twitter hierarchies work because it’s an important part of our discussion. The real problem here is clearly that I’m telling wealthy, influential or otherwise important people to go f*ck themselves, because as any marginalized and unverified user who has tried to report open bigoted harassment and threats can tell you, Twitter absolutely does not give a damn what poor people say to each other on their platform.

Therein of course lies the rub, because as much as you and I may want to use Twitter to interact with each other and talk about left wing theory all day, the fact is that chatting is not Twitter’s business model. Despite what you’ve heard from podcast bros and marketing lanyards, there is absolutely no such thing as a sh*tposting economy. Have you ever paid to chat with your friends on Twitter? Do you think you’ve ever seen enough promoted posts to explain how Twitter remains in business? Obviously, the answer to both of these questions is a resounding no.

So what is their business model? To some degree and as you already know, a big part of it is harvesting data for both the imperial state and various corporate monoliths in our society. Indeed, selling customer data has become a well known and integral part of virtually every online communication platform Big Tech has to offer at this point and even if the mainstream media continues its quixotic quest to pretend the Snowden leaks didn’t happen, the vast majority of people are still aware the American “deep state” helps fund social media so they can use it to spy on people across the globe and in some extremely unlikely situations. If that was literally all Twitter did to stay in the game however, they wouldn’t survive in the modern neofeudalist economy since ultimately, platforms like Google’s Gmail and Facebook all do these exact same things much, much better than Twitter could ever hope to match.

I would posit instead then that Twitter’s real business model is actually selling influence, or more specifically a relatively captive audience that simply by using the platform normally, makes itself highly susceptible to organized efforts to build, expand and wield influence over them. Twitter is essentially a market comprised of literally millions upon millions of potential marks, via which influential people can peddle ideas, products, political candidates or any other sort of information they would like, and in most cases will profit from in some way. Of course, Twitter itself does its level best to obscure this reality from the portion of its user base they’ve marked out as the markets to be targeted, but in some ways this is still all very obvious and out in the open. Straightforward examples might include the tight control the company now maintains over its verification process, or the blatant inclusion of post metrics and arguments about how many people you can reach (and presumably influence) contained in Twitter’s own advertising material that it freely shares with corporations and high-profile “influencers” online. Hell, if I’m being honest here, the reason I signed up for a Twitter account in the first place myself was to share my writing and observations with a larger audience than forum trolling would allow at that time.

So on the whole then it can be fairly stated without really veering off into anything conspiratorial, that Twitter is really a vast, largely-unregulated, influence trading machine, disguised as a kind of real-time media platform, that is itself further still disguised, as a chat program and social networking site. Whew, that’s sure is a lot of masks, Jack; and accordingly it’s taken the Scooby Gang of complacent American journalism just over a decade to really notice these masks and start pulling them off to find out what’s underneath. As for myself however, after spending over ten years on Twitter across literally seven accounts, I’m pretty certain that this is in fact only the tip of the iceberg, and in reality this masks over masks approach has facilitated far more sinister applications of this influence trading business, on a largely unsuspecting public; in other words, everyday people simply using Twitter to chat with friends and keep up on breaking news. The unnerving truth of it all as far as I can tell, is that almost everyone “important” or everyone you frequently hear from on the Twitter platform, is running some kind of sleazy game on this again, largely unsuspecting public.

Now, to be sure, sometimes the game a given account is running is pretty obvious or in and of itself, largely harmless. For example, you yourself might have a Twitter account and if so, there’s a pretty good chance you aren’t looking to accomplish more than interact directly with your favorite influencers and perhaps amass an ever-increasing number of followers. Furthermore, I don’t think you need me to tell you that the Wendy’s fan account on Twitter is not really your friend, they just want to sell hamburgers, or that there’s probably nothing sinister about the independent anarchist analyst using the website to post links to her free online writing.

On the other hand, I’d also suggest to you that twitchy writers who don’t have to pay rent and enjoy living like a broke hermit are in fact a rarity on the platform, and there is really nothing stopping a corporation like Wendy’s from also pretending to be several hundred adoring fans who really love their burgers and religiously interact with that same fan account. Just as there’s really nothing (except perhaps her own lazy op-sec) stopping someone like Sally Albright from operating over a hundred sock-puppet accounts wearing dead people’s faces, to push the idea that there’s a lot of popular support for center-right neoliberals who think Bernie Sanders is worse than fascism. For most people who objectively seem to be living online, spending all day on Twitter is a business decision, not a time-wasting luxury; give or take the hour long periods before lunch and quitting time when cubicle nation in America floods the discourse with pictures of their food and political hot takes fresh off the presses from the Reagan Revolution.

I mean let’s get down to brass tacks here because neither one of us has all day to spend contemplating our navels in the middle of a global plague. Even if all you read is mainstream corporate media, you already know the Trump campaign and right wing billionaires dumped obscene amounts of money into mainstreaming fascism and pushing anti-Clinton conspiracy theories on social media. You know far right shock jocks have coordinated together to spread those conspiracies on Twitter and other platforms. You already know there are foreign state actors employing troll armies online, although as I’ve said often enough in the past, arguments that these bot-wielding trolls can actually “rig” Pig Empire elections, any more than they already are rigged by domestic actors and money power, are quite laughable.

If you’ve got a better memory than a goldfish (don’t laugh, most people don’t,) you also already know that the American CIA is actively operating on Twitter, and considers social media such an important vector of generating influence that they once created a fake Twitter-clone social media service, just to f*ck with Cuba. Destabilizing the politics of entire countries in Latin America with social media? That’s old hat at this point. Marginalizing critics of imperial power through online smear campaigns and coordinated brigading? That kind of sh*t happens all the time; I mean do you honestly think it’s an accident that the entire pro-neoliberal, Democrat influencer Twitterverse always seems to have the exact same talking points on hand to defend their patrons? Wikileaks and verified emails say it probably isn’t.

I could of course go on, but at the point that I’ve demonstrated the entire gamut of crappy actors from neo-nazi forum chuds, paid political operatives, private sector corporations and even state intelligence agencies, are all running forms of influence games on Twitter’s platform, it’s fair to say this isn’t all that complicated or much of a secret. If a f*cking mutant like Ian Miles Cheong can figure out how to game this system from half a world away, you can bet pretty much everyone else online has some inkling of how it all works too – even if we rarely discuss it for fear of being labeled paranoid.

So in understanding all that, I would in fact say to my critics that even aside from Twitter’s obvious attempts to silence left wing, anti-capitalist thought on its platform, the idea that the problem here is me or my personality, is absolutely ludicrous on its face. I mean you throw me out there with political mercenaries, neo-nazis, liars, misogynists, hucksters, corporate minions, literal f*cking spies and assassins, war criminals, think tank mutants pushing coordinated political agendas, racist Chan kiddies running coordinated harassment campaigns, and all other manner of professionally compensated bullsh*ters; and then you tell me that even as I’m watching them try to smear me, manipulate me and silence me in real time, I’m not allow to say “go jump in the f*cking lake” at them? That is to put it simply, bougie f*ckery and complete nonsense; I won’t tolerate it, and you rich pricks and your minions can sincerely shove your “polite discourse” up your backside at that point.

To borrow sh*t-tier conservative comedian Dennis Miller’s shtick, I’m don’t want to go off on a rant here, but you folks have got to be f*cking kidding me right? If at the end of the day, you’re prepared to look me in the eye and say that Twitter is genuinely better off without lil’ ole me, but does desperately need sneering propagandist trolls like Neera Tanden, or fascist liars helping to coordinate stochastic terrorism campaigns against activists, like Andy Ngo; because I swear at rich people who’re literally killing folks just like me all over the world? Well then mate, it’s fair to say that you and I have rather different, indeed even incompatible understandings of what civil discourse is and what public discussion is for.

And quite frankly if that’s the case – you can keep it, Jack.

*The jury is still out on that one by the way, a small core of my closest friends are sharing the crap out of my work but overall, I’m still slowly vanishing from Twitter; which is not ideal.

 

• nina illingworth