What To Do When Twitter Becomes Unusable?

There isn't a replacement.

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

Several people have given up Twitter now arguing that it is simply not fit for any kind of meaningful engagement on social and cultural issues. I cannot deny that they are right. I have had to deactivate my account again due to another bout of sheer nastiness and spite flying at me. I just do not have the right kind of psychology to be able to ignore the irrelevant mudslinging from a vocal and persistent minority and focus on the many more reasonable and interesting voices engaging with what I am actually saying and my motivations for saying it. There is something masochistic about continuing to go back to Twitter when this inevitably happens and affects me (and many others) so badly.

And yet, there is no other platform on which people can engage with other people in a public way that is open to all and share ideas and discuss them in real time in writing. That is, there is no other platform that provides both a social function and an intellectual one at the same time and does so through the medium of writing. As it is this combination that comprises the ideal way to engage with others on issues of culture, politics, ethics and current affairs for me, and I suspect many other people who use Twitter, there does not seem to be any real solution.

Many people have suggested solutions but they don’t hit the mark. They fall into two categories that we could think of as external solutions or internal solutions. The external solutions require giving up entirely on being able to engage with other people in a conversational style in real time in writing and engage with ideas in some other format. The internal solutions require drastically changing one’s own psychology from that of a typical social mammal who cares what other people think to some kind of self-contained robot who cannot be affected by the opinions of others or, more generously to the proponents of this approach, only by those others who are offering thoughtful and honest opinions worth caring about.

The External Solutions

An external solution is achievable by many people, probably by most people. As far as I can tell, the majority of people do not like to do their real-time engagement with others on the subject of ideas in the form of writing at all, but in spoken conversation. Of those who do like to read and write about ideas, many are most happiest to do so in the form of reading long-form essays and books and writing long-form arguments of their own.

The vast majority of the people I know in real life simply do not see the appeal of Twitter at all and are bewildered that engaging with it is has ever been something I consider a worthwhile, thought-provoking and enjoyable activity. Why not just go out and talk to people to meet social needs, they ask? Well, very few people in real life share my rather niche interests and I am somewhat single-minded so within an hour of sitting and talking to people in my local vicinity, my brain has exited the building. If I want to find people who share my interests and can engage with them in ways I find challenging and thoughtful, I need a huge pool of individuals to choose from and Twitter lends itself to finding and making these networks. It was the appeal of it from the start before things got nasty.

The same is true for my offspring, although because her niche interest in Japanese language, art and culture is not political, it has not got nasty. She certainly couldn’t find anybody at school who shared her interests. I have often argued with people who have blanket rules against teenage girls using social media as they always imagine them getting into networks that revolve around fashion, beauty and sexuality in unhealthy ways that damage their body image and self-confidence. They seem to forget that it is extremely easy to find these cliques at school and in real life. It is, in fact, to find friends who are interested in anything else that some teenage girls with specific intellectual and/or geeky interests need to go online.

Others of my real life friends who are intellectual types are also bewildered that Twitter could hold any appeal. Why not just read thoughtful essays and books and write them, they ask? Well, firstly, that is a bit lonely. I like to write essays, obviously, but only writing essays feels a lot like speaking into a void. I like to have somewhere to think aloud about whatever ideas I am having and see what other people think and listen to and incorporate their thoughts into my own thinking. Of course, I can always become part of real-life networks of academics interested in similar things and brainstorm ideas with them. This would probably work perfectly adequately if I were interested in academic subjects like neuroscience or medieval history. I am actually interested in both and so I know that reading, writing and attending conferences about them is perfectly adequate.

The second problem is that I am interested in the shifts and tides of culture and politics and discourses around them and I cannot get that from speaking only to academics or only reading books and essays. In order to keep one’s finger on the pulse of what ideas are circulating and how they shift in real time, one needs to be on social media. By only paying attention to the output of people who write and/or speak for a living, you limit your sources to the views of a certain class of people and end up with very little understanding of popular discourse. I am sorry, academic friends who also address these issues but proudly avoid social media and advocate doing so, but your limited sources show in your writing. The main signs that somebody is not paying any attention to the rapid shifts of popular discourse in real time is that their writing is always somewhat out of date and they have very little understanding of the thoughts & views of the vast majority of people who are not academics or journalists. This should give you particular cause for concern if your politics are left-wing and you think that the left needs to be paying more attention to issues of socio-economic class and also listening more to the concerns of the working class.

The Internal Solutions

The internal solution to not being so deeply impacted by the nastiness that occurs on social media is probably much easier to state than to achieve. This involves cultivating an ability to shrug off unjust criticisms, mischaracterisations, smears and (often deliberate) misunderstandings of one’s ideas or motivations, not to mention the outright malicious abuse. It requires having enough confidence in oneself to simply scroll past dishonest responders as beneath one’s notice and genuinely not give them a second thought and only engage with those saying something thoughtful and intelligent in good faith.

There are some people who seem to be able to do this. I have witnessed people with huge Twitter profiles simply ignoring those who distort and twist their words and make unfounded aspersions against their character and seeming to just carry on confidently making their arguments and responding honestly to honest critique. I admire them immensely for this and have asked a number of them with whom I am in contact how they manage not to let it get to them. Responses have been mixed and also revealing.

While some people do read their notifications but manage to recognise and ignore those people not worth engaging with and genuinely not be bothered by them, more do not. Some tell me that they manage by not looking at their notifications or by limiting the number they see to those they follow or by using tools to mass-block those who give strong grounds for suspecting them of being bad faith actors. Others tell me they do not manage at all, but simply keep the impact of it upon their mental health private and give no sign of it. The number of people who have told me, in confidence, that they have suffered a complete nervous collapse, required hospitalisation or medication and still struggle daily with managing their mental health and their social media engagement is both comforting and depressing.

My impression is that it is possible for some people with a particularly strong sense of self to genuinely not let it get to them, but that this is the exception rather than the rule. As a general rule, we social mammals are very deeply affected by the opinions of others and find it very difficult not to allow them to affect our sense of self even if they are completely unjust. Even when we know the character being assassinated is not actually our own or the views being attributed to us are not those we have ever thought or expressed and the motivations we are accused of holding bear no resemblance to our real ones at all, it is very difficult not to take this personally and feel diminished by it.

This also raises the issue of how healthy it is to cultivate a habit of not caring for public opinion and better and worse ways of doing this. I, myself, have spent two years and a considerable amount of money on trying to learn to do this in a healthy way via Schema Therapy which is closely related to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This aimed to help me have a stronger sense of my self and to recognise that other people saying nasty things about me did not actually affect who I really am at all. I can see the truth of this intellectually for myself and I can see it in relation to other people intuitively, but I cannot feel it for myself. I made only limited progress in strengthening my resilience and ability to cope psychologically with the backlash that comes from addressing political and cultural issues where I am publicly accessible. Ultimately, the recommendation of my clinicians was that my mental and physical health relied upon me no longer doing that and withdrawing from any public engagement. Other people have had much more success at learning healthy resilience and ignoring those who deserve to be ignored and I continue to recommend this kind of evidence-based therapy as the healthiest way to gain perspective and engage in the public sphere.

There are, of course, much less healthy ways to learn to stop caring about public opinion and this includes becoming abusive and dishonest yourself, losing your moral compass and becoming distinctly anti-social. (This coping mechanism in schema therapy is known as “overcompensation” and looks like fighting back with punches becoming sloppy). More mildly, you could just become closed-minded and dogmatic and inclined to regard any criticism or disagreement as a personal attack by a bad actor as a kind of permanent protective shield against the abuse that is. Online, this attitude is often referred to as “Everybody who disagrees with me is Hitler.” It is not good for the individual and not good for the state of public discourse. If you find yourself falling into this state of mind, it is definitely time to either go for therapy or get out of the public sphere.

Unfortunately, the state of social media when it comes to discussing sensitive issues of culture and politics is such that it positively encourages the survival not of the fittest but of the thickest skinned or of those most willing to fight dirty. For those wonderful people who manage to maintain a thick skin and their integrity, empathy and openness to honest criticism at the same time, we should all be truly grateful. Unfortunately, this appears to be very difficult for most people and consequently, many of the most thoughtful voices have either been intimidated off social media or become much less thoughtful and succumbed to the partisan mud-slinging.

The Solution?

I do not have one. The external solutions are possible but very much limited and mostly involve simply giving up on being able to share ideas with a wide range of people in real time and in writing and keeping one’s finger on the pulse of popular discourse. Giving up is not really a solution. The internal solutions are not achievable by many people largely due to the conflict between a healthy human psychology with regards to social interactions and the way that Twitter works to pick off and demoralise who would like to keep their psychology healthy.

The best suggestion I can make at the moment for anybody who is struggling to deal with Twitter but who is not yet willing to simply give up on accessing all the benefits it has to offer is to use a mixture of these solutions that suits their own psychology. I myself go back and forth on whether to leave Twitter or to minimise my use of it and learn to deal better with it. I have not yet found a solution that works. I think for now, I shall try this combination of external and internal solutions:

• Minimise use of Twitter and make more use of SubStack (already discussed here)

• Have regular Twitter breaks.

• Only use Twitter when in a positive frame of mind.

• Continue to minimise my public profile and attract less attention.

• Make prolific use of the block function.

• Make and keep to a hard and fast rule not to respond to abusive or dishonest people.

• Log off when I feel myself taking things that should be ignored personally and have serious words with myself about this drawing on the techniques of schema therapy.

It is a shame that Twitter has not lived up to its early promise of being a way to find and communicate with a wide range of people, but has been so subverted by abusive trolls but it seems this was inevitable given the way human nature and societal groupings work. There isn’t an alternative that offers the same reach and, if there were, it would almost certainly go the same way. Ultimately, Twitter is definitely bad for me and, probably for most people, but abandoning it is also bad for anybody who wants to do what I do and really engage with popular discourse. My mental health certainly improved in the nine months I was away from it, but at the cost of my creativity, ability to keep up with cultural shifts and my will to think and write about them. I shall probably continue to go back and forth on the pros and cons of Twitter for some time and you, my very patient readers on the subject, can choose to follow my meanderings or skip over them.