Twitter

I’m not sure why I rejoined the cesspool of Twitter in January 2022, perhaps it was boredom, or trying to keep up to date on world politics. If Twitter can be counted as a go-to source for that activity. I originally joined for the first time back in 2018, but the Twitter logo of the bluebird of happiness quickly changed to a devouring vulture, and having never experienced the nature of trolling it was quite a shock to the system. So I left after two years.

So now I am back with 353 followers, while I follow 249. I always follow back after reviewing the follower’s bio and a sample of their tweets, so you may wonder about the 104 discrepancies between my followers and the people I follow. This 30% discrepancy is accounted for by the number of young, beautiful, Chinese ladies who have decided to follow me. I have often asked myself, is it the charm of my tweets, the subject matter of my tweets, or my vibrant, charismatic personality projecting on each post? But alas I feel it is something quite more sinister. In reviewing these charming, Chinese lady’s tweets, they are full of selfies taken in some exotic location and devoid of any other content. So I never follow back.

Twitter is usually a hive of negativity with a few positive nuggets thrown in here and there. I’m not sure if this negativity is fed by corporate algorithms, bots, media, or social media influencers. We have been in the middle of raging culture wars for some years now, amplified by the use of social media. How much more fuel can we throw on the fire? This negative activity, as Jonathan Haidt so aptly puts it, throws people into defense mode, as the sense of threat colors everything, and thus nothing creative emerges. Haidt in one of his books compares Twitter to the Tower of Babel, ” let us go down and confuse their language so that they cannot understand each other.”

For the first time, I am full of optimism for Twitter, now that Elon Musk has taken control, Perhaps he can eliminate the bots and trolls who like to play silly mind games with their audiences, and turn it into a legitimate platform of free speech where people can actually engage with ideas and arguments. I have never followed the proposition that the science is in, so there can be no further discussion on certain topics. Everything should be open to debate, and it’s my wish that Musk can turn Twitter into that kind of free speech platform.