EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | Is Twitter a force for social good?

Twitter is the best and worst thing that has happened to public debate.

On the one hand, it has reduced the power of gatekeepers. You no longer need to have a letter published in a newspaper for you to be heard everywhere. You can tweet your truth, unedited, right now. That is (mostly) a good thing. On the other hand, it has enabled greater volumes of viciousness. This is seemingly the price we must pay for expanding the number of voices that can participate in public debate.

With Elon Musk having emerged as the imminent new owner of the social media platform, and committed to what he describes as free speech “absolutism”, this raises the question of whether, on balance, Twitter is a force for social good despite the pitfalls that come with it?

You would likely be deemed a moral or political coward, or an agnostic weakling unable to assess evidence if you say you need to read and think more before deciding what your take is.

I cannot make up my mind.

Interestingly, my uncertainty is antithetical to the Twitter culture. On the platform you are supposed to assert convictions. It has evolved into one where people seem to feel compelled to only have final views rather than also puzzling through complexities and uncertainties.

If you dare say you are unsure about, for example, what SA’s foreign policy position should be on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, you will be pummelled by many people who have convictions about whether the country’s position — or what can be gleaned as its position — is good or bad.

Binaries and certainties are welcomed, raising questions and being exploratory not so much. You would likely be deemed a moral or political coward, or an agnostic weakling unable to assess evidence if you say you need to read and think more before deciding what your take is.

And so, ironically, my uncertainty about whether Twitter is a force for social good is one reason to think it is not. This type of careful explanation of my uncertainty that I can explain in this format — the good old newspaper column or essay (albeit digital these days) — is not discourse that can easily be constructed on Twitter.

That said, you can curate your own Twitter experience, as University of Cape Town (UCT) lecturer in critical thinking and ethics Jacques Rousseau rightly pointed out to me in a recent podcast discussion we had about the platform. He avoids a lot of the bile and vitriol that can make life on Twitter emotionally and otherwise risky, while also enjoying the benefits of considered engagement by choosing to follow only a handful of Twitter accounts, ones belonging to people who can add the type of value to his life online as they might have done offline were they to meet in person. These are some of the steps you can take to reduce the chances of being subjected to online violence and harassment, while not leaving the platform.

You can simply choose peace by muting those you do not wish to see on your timeline.

Most of us are afraid of missing out on the cesspool of dominant Twitter accounts, so we do not choose to have quiet Twitter lives.

But if we are honest, most of us are afraid of missing out on the cesspool of dominant Twitter accounts so we do not choose to have quiet Twitter lives.

We just cannot help ourselves. We want to gawk at and participate in the main Twitter activity with the same intense desire that one John Steenhuisen has to be relevant to our lives.

Very few of us choose peace. Also, trolls and bullies are so skilled at being violent that you need not follow them on Twitter to be victimised by them. Some women journalists who have never been on Twitter or who have, because of online harassment, left the platform, still get trolled and viciously attacked, and the trauma reaches them anyway because Twitter content gets distributed on other platforms. Even traditional media take Twitter content and splash it on their platforms.

The worst aspects of Twitter are therefore hard, if not impossible, to escape. You cannot make vicious trolls disappear quite so easily.

This is all before we try to figure out what Musk means by “absolutism”, an apparent allusion to fewer hurdles he wishes to see in terms of what content is allowed on the platform.

If Twitter, despite its current policies, is already a tricky and often vicious space to negotiate, it is hard to imagine how much worse it can get.

It is already effectively a libertarian space. There is a lot of bullying, hate speech, racism, misogyny and other kinds of harmful content that is not eliminated. I am not sure I even know what it would mean to allow “more” content on the platform unless by “absolutism” Musk wishes to endorse harmful content such as racist speech acts? That would be an abomination.

Commitment to free speech does not entail a duty to provide a platform for hatred. No one has a right to a platform and therefore owners of platforms can decide what content should not be allowed.

Though it might be true that free speech derives its main value from the fact that it allows for rational discourse and an expression of our autonomous selves, we are not thereby entitled to trample on other people’s inherent self-worth.

The fundamental point of free speech can be protected and affirmed without inventing a right to speech that is unfettered and unconstrained.

You can be progressive, value the role of speech rights in a liberal democracy and also accept moral limits on speech rights precisely because the limits are an expression of a deep commitment to the foundational values of your liberal democracy.

It is nonsense to think the gold standard for valuing speech rights is your tolerance for harmful content. We can quibble about where the boundaries should lie — and that is a difficult discussion that is often context dependent, changing as the mores and other factors in a society changes even. But we should surely all agree that in principle the idea of no constraints on what we can tweet is as unconvincing as thinking we should be allowed to say or write what we want in other contexts.

There are other concepts that are difficult to disentangle, such as the difference between being offended and being harmed. Not all content that offends me should be classified as harmful and disallowed. However, these details should not obscure the nexus point that we should not be allowed to tweet what we want. It is better to have ongoing difficult discussion about where to draw the line than to give up on defining harm, and taking seriously the ethical duty you have as a host of any platform to make sure users do not use it to violate the rights of others.

That said, the benefits of Twitter to society are massive.

Never in political history, to take just one theme, has there been such proximity between politicians, including elected officials, and citizens. It is easy, for example, to find and engage a government minister. Even if they are not on Twitter, you can set Twitter ablaze with critical questions for politicians that they simply cannot ignore, wherever they are. Twitter, in that sense, became an additional and enormously powerful tool of democratic accountability. We should not take that for granted. It is little wonder politicians and elected officials often first rush to see how Twitter reacted to what they said or did than caring about what a newspaper editorial will say the next day. Twitter cannot be ignored and that is a benefit we should keep tapping into.

The platform is also sometimes an efficient distribution mechanism for news and information to reach people quickly. If you followed the horrendous recent floods in KZN on Twitter, for example, doing so enabled you to see what was going on much more quickly and widely than waiting for a news crew to arrive. It also allowed people to help each other and connect in ways that are more efficient than through other means. Unfiltered citizen content can also have the upside of not being subjected to a news editor’s unconscious biases.

The problem, unfortunately, is that strengths are, invariably, also weaknesses. Journalists have an ethical duty to be guided by the values of truth, truthfulness and accuracy. That, over time, confers credibility on a journalist and a news organisation. Credibility is the most important basis for trusting a news outlet.

On Twitter, misinformation and disinformation can be peddled because values such as truth, truthfulness and accuracy are not cherished by every Twitter user. Indeed, some intentionally abuse the medium for propagandistic and nefarious ends, including the subversion of democracy. It is often hard to separate truths from falsehoods, which is why older media will remain relevant and live side by side with social media, rather than becoming obsolete.

Perhaps most under the radar is an overdue discussion about the illusion of democratic debate on Twitter.

Millions of people are invisible to the Twitter collective or spoken for, rather than brought into the digital circle.

The platform can be and is exclusionary. It also reproduces many of the unequal power relations of offline life.

Millions of poor black South Africans are not on Twitter and, to take one example why this matters, just because a middle-class, left-wing person committed to a more just SA tweets about inequality and poverty does not mean we are eliminating structural injustices.

Millions of people are invisible to the Twitter collective or spoken for rather than brought into the digital circle.

Even online activists can become digital elites in a country in which being able to access and participate in Twitter conversation is a luxury.

This is not to say there is no diversity on Twitter — there is — but we should guard against extrapolating from the platform to society at large too hastily.

That does not mean massive sources of economic and social power, such as big business and the state, should not be kept on their toes by activists who see Twitter as another frontier where the battle for justice is fought.

We should keep in mind though that Twitter is merely one part of our lives. If we really want to change SA and avert the horrible but realistic possibility of nationwide implosion under the weight of poverty, inequality and joblessness, then we probably need to all spend less time on Twitter and do the much harder work required offline to realise the full potential of our country.

Twitter, in the end, isn’t real life. It can be a force for social good, I suppose, provided we are cognisant of the power and limitations of the platform.

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