The tide has gone out on Twitter

Pierre Bergaigne “Carnival Parade with Masked Figures”

The day after the Key Bridge collapsed in Baltimore, I saw a Tweet that lamented the state of Twitter these days. Liz Power, from Media Matters, tweeted this: “I know this has been discussed endlessly but it really is depressing how this platform went from the first place I'd go to get information on breaking news to a place where breaking news events are immediately inundated with conspiracies and misinformation”

Indeed: the tide has gone out and those of us who are left on the shore are surrounded by conspiracies and misinformation.

It isn’t as if the misinformation is new. When the shooting happened at the Quebec City mosque in 2017, I remember watching the conspiracies and misinformation flood my feed as I scrolled from bed in my Ottawa hotel room the whole night. People were saying things about Quebec City that were clearly false — clear to me, anyway, as someone who lives here — and they were relentless. Thousands of posts full of lies and disinformation.

But it was different back then. There were still enough real people on the platform who one could know and trust and follow. It’s that that the platform is missing now: way too many real people have left.

I’m not opposed to anonymous accounts. I think anonymity is necessary for a lot of great reasons. But too much anonymity and everything becomes meaningless. And that’s the current crisis plaguing the platform.

This hit me this past weekend when I heard that my friend and comrade John Bell passed away. John was a lifelong socialist. He was a writer and a fighter and someone who I interacted most with on Twitter rather than in real life. But we had met in real life. I knew him and his friends. We had common touch points. If he disagreed with something I wrote, I wouldn’t call him an asshole or tell him to fuck himself — I’d be surprised at the disagreement and talk through it with him. I would have a normal, human conversation.

But that’s not possible when so many accounts are anonymous. I find it hard to keep track of people’s handles if they aren’t names and so I forget who I’ve interacted with, where someone says they’re located, if they’re a friend or foe.

They also, in turn, don’t know me. One friend always laughs when she sees people accusing me of being perpetually angry. “You’re like the least angry person I know!” she says. Which is true! Unless I’m walking around near cars.

Anonymity has transformed Twitter. With so few real people to water down the constant barrage of anonymous accounts, my replies have become a clown parade of foolishness. There’s no bulding anything with anyone the way there was five years ago. And it creates an uncomfortable power dynamic. Years ago, I was at a conference in London and one of the presenters was someone I was “twitter friends” with. When I went up to say hi at the end of the presentation, the recognition was mutual. She knew me and I knew her and there we were, finally meeting in person.

Now, I have no idea who I’m interacting with, mostly. They might know me but are they CrankyPants90 or I Woke Up Like This? I have no clue.

Creating online worlds where people are mostly anonymous is intentionally trying to destroy what little sense of community we can build for ourselves online. For a platform like Twitter where anonymity is part of the mix of users, and not the dominant kind of user, it will be the eventual death of the platform. People can only take so much constant shifting of mutuals and contacts before they check out. And worse, people can only take a certain level of abuse and that abuse gets more intense the more anonymous your contacts become, if you are real.

The mix of the two is brutal because anonymous accounts can form one’s image in their own liking. Without anyone to step in and say, ‘woah, wait, this person isn’t terrible, I know them in real life” the always-present Twitter mob can fashion our identities into what they want. And we are pretty much powerless but to accept it. It’s tiresome and frankly, dangerous. Because even if 65% of anonymous twitter users are operating in good faith, simply using a shield to protect their identity and allow them the feeling of free speech, there are enough who are malicious. Who are law enforcement. Who want to destabilize, defame and destroy.

There has been a remarkable exit from Twitter in Canada since Elon Musk took over. The tide has gone out and maybe I’m finally realizing that hanging around with the dregs and the crabs isn’t actually all tht fun.