Twitter renaming won't change it but hopefully more is to come

In about 2016 Twitter had become fatally wounded in its current form. Other social media sites are now springing up because of Elon Musk’s changes but the fundamental ingredient of the monster is still the same. As long as people are involved the outcome will be disappointing.

I am not sure if it’s up to the proprietor to put in place “better” rules that can cope with the different ways people use to abuse their privileges. I’ve yet to see a social media platform that actually encourages worthwhile debate, though not being a Chinese speaker it’s possible that there is one out there. Perhaps a person who uses WeChat can advise. If anyone has a better idea let me know.

Musk just might be crazy enough to be able to tame the beast. He’s changed the parameters in every industry he’s entered and is nothing if not unconventional, and doing things the same way they’ve always been done is not going to give us the results we seem to agree we seek. I wonder though. If all the bad-faith actors using anonymous accounts were put together in a room and asked to put their hands up to say they wanted more civil conversations, how many would do so? Someone once said to me that the reason people are so aggressive on Twitter is because to speak politely would do violence to the extremes of feeling they experience when confronted by one or more issues. 

I can understand that but I also understand that in a pluralists democracy you are naturally going to get a range of opinions. If we all thought about every issue in the same way it’s be weird, so being able to challenge people whose natural bias is different from yours requires a degree of diplomatic skill. Perhaps people think it’s a “cop out” to speak in a civil manner? Perhaps they must speak strongly in order to honestly convey the strength of their feelings.

I don’t know about you but I don’t like it when people shout at me and we haven’t been introduced, haven’t established any ground rules for conduct. If I meet someone in a highway rest stop I’m going to be civil and courteous and guarded because I don’t want to be smashed in the face, but people on Twitter talking about a topic that interests them smash without talking and be damned because they’re in no danger of being hit down to the pavement.

It’s this lack of accountability that gives people license to behave like animals, or else like school kids scrapping and cussing in the playground after science class has ended. But then do we blame the teachers for the low tone of the entire school or do we blame the parents?

I think that politicians must accept some blame for the way things are turning out online. The incessant carping, the insulting dismissals of differing opinions, the inability or unwillingness to compromise are corroding public debate. It’s been going on for years but now it’s time to stop. Our system of government has a thing called Question Time when Opposition pollies can get a chance to launch difficult questions to the government, but the way the latter responds to the former is mostly unedifying. I want politicians universally to THINK for a moment about how their insults veiled and overt affect the wider community so that we can start to build a more sustainable public sphere.

Rhetorical standards being what they are, and politicians not being the most imaginative people alive, I won’t hold my breath. I just think this is a good place to start.

Epidemic of social media abuse being fuelled by bleeding hearts

Whenever I hear someone attack the attackers they point the finger to the right wing trolls, but let’s be frank the right wing is typified by trolling. You don’t expect a Nazi to be nice, but the woke left who want social justice and human rights are playing with the same language.

This is clear, the left are just as bad as the right when it comes to online abuse, and in the left’s case it’s not excusable. If you promote peace and forgiveness you’d better be prepared to practice what you preach or else you just end up fuelling the sort of vicious spiral that saw Lisa Millar from the BAC ‘Breakfast Couch’ program quite Twitter in disgust.

The ABC is in an unenviable position because their charter stipulates they must be balanced. If this means giving air time to those on the right of the political spectrum then so be it, but there are thousands on the left WHO WILL NOT TOLERATE THIS. They criticise the ABC for even allowing people whose views are different from theirs to be on-camera, they attack journalists (most particularly in the context of Int’l Women’s Day, which was yesterday, female journalists), and they lower the tone for everyone allowing more bad language to proliferate.

You are responsible.

It’s not some nameless goon in a suit who profits from the hate, it’s people you celebrate because their views consone with yours. It’s not a big corporation that makes money out of the poor conduct, it’s you. Just stop it.

The thing with social media is that there’s no consequences for poor conduct. People use anonymous accounts and raise the bar to the highest pitch BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MATTER if someone disagrees with them. If they’re in a pub and start carrying on like a pork chop they might get floored by a punch in the nose, but not online. Online they can say precisely anything they want.

Putin can say anything he wants because there’re no consequences. Trump taught him how to bend the rules so far they threaten to break. Trump was nothing without Twitter, and when Twitter closed his account he stopped being a threat. Now that he’s back in the loop we’d better be careful.

But everyone has a way to stop the abuse, stop the lies, stop the spoken hate. We can all work to raise the tone of social media, but where’s the incentive. People “like” tweets that take the most extreme position, the platform celebrates hyperbole and ridicule, so how do we stop the rot? It’s up to all of us to take a private stand. Not because it’ll make us popular, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Mainstream media to play a growing role as Trump media comes online

In the old days, in other countries, when the military decided to take over they first went to the TV station so that they could control messaging. In China today – even in the heart of our own century – the government decided to play by different rules and to set up alternative public spaces to harbour discussion, and so new social media companies came into existence. Now, Donald Trump has just appointed a new CEO for his new socmed company, a former Republican Congressman named Devin Nunes.

Since many people were disgusted by Trump’s encouragement of the January Congress riots, and since many on the other side will follow Trump anywhere he leads, what you’re going to have in the United States is an increasingly polarised public sphere where the mainstream media – which will include people with stronger stomachs than most, who’ll be paid to take out accounts on Trump’s platform so they can monitor developments and trends there – will play a growing role in the community.

Because of this there’ll be times when Trump might disenfranchise journalists who don’t follow his line, disabling their accounts, removing posts, or even provoking pile-ons. As a result many journalists will use anonymous accounts in order to monitor debate, and so that they can get information without being blocked or censured. Anonymity is a pressing matter in Australia, where the government is developing laws that’ll make it mandatory for social media companies to divulge the identities and contact details of people whose remarks are deemed by a court to be offensive and defamatory. If they don’t do so, the government says, they themselves will be liable in any court case brought as a result of actionable comments made on their platforms.

It’s important for the Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government to carefully word such laws as it’s clear that anonymity is going to remain, in many countries, an important resource for the legitimate participation of various actors in several spheres of endeavour. You need to balance the requirements of many different parties if you’re not going to cause harm in one way by achieving justice in another way. I look forward to what eventuates, and no doubt the mainstream media will, as usual, report in a balanced way on such developments. At least, in Australia, we don’t have rogue politicians seeking to establish a personal public domain where their messages can go unchallenged. We’re lucky to have the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which supplies reliable information for all citizens (and even for some people living overseas).

Melbourne protest rally might be turning point for civility in social media

In the middle of this month a protest rally on account of new laws the Labor government wanted to enact regarding Covid and the health response caused hundreds of people to flock to the streets. Visible among them was a cart with a gallows and three nooses. Missiles were hurled, resulting in injuries. The language on some of the placards was intemperate.

On social media prominent left-wing commentators themselves protested the rally but ignored how they, themselves, often use intemperate language in order to achieve their rhetorical goals. Flaming and ridicule are part of the arsenal of such individuals – who often hide behind anonymity online – and this had caused the prime minister to vociferate publicly against the tenor of debate. Earlier in the month he’d even voiced ideas about making the big tech companies more accountable for what was published on their platforms.

Australia had already moved in this direction, the High Court finding that media companies are responsible for the comments people leave on their Facebook pages. Morrison (the PM) was saying what many – people like me, who sit in the centre – think: that online conversations need to be more responsive to the real world and that the freewheeling tone of social media is becoming more and more toxic.

On TV, the leader of the Opposition criticised the PM for criticising state governments that had chosen to restrict people’s freedom. Morrison utterly condemned calls for violence, he said, but understood that many people are frustrated. Australians have done their bit and governments, he averred, needed to do the same.

This was seen by many as condoning extremism. The first journalist I heard voicing an opinion about Morrison’s words (it happened to be the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Andrew Probyn) expressed a degree of puzzlement. I think this is understandable. We’re puzzled, all of us, but we encourage the type of extreme expressions embodied in the gallows and the nooses. We’re part of the problem, and perhaps this current debate will serve as a turning point. Along with whatever measures the federal government attempts to introduce – though it’s arguable whether they’ll have time to do so before the next federal election – this conversation can be our saving grace.

Social media authentication regime would be a face too steep to climb

The Sydney Morning Herald reported three days ago that a report had been tabled in federal Parliament regarding safety and domestic violence, in which there was a suggestion it 

called for users to be required to present 100 points of identification – which could include a driver’s licence, birth certificate, Medicare card, or passport – in order to open or maintain an existing social media account with companies such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

At about the same time, a federal minister announced that she used an anonymous account to conduct some discussions with the community. What might’ve surprised the government – which did not, it must be remembered, make any policy announcement in response to the committee’s report – was the reaction of that respected (but never respectful) community. 

It was, of course, utterly offended. Not that the community is ever short on expressions of hatred aimed at the government. It seems that the outrage mill that runs 24 hours a day is always switching its allegiances, taking up for a few hours one issue or another in its endless cycle of bonding and othering, a relentless attempt to satisfy our collective vanity. 

But let’s think about this briefly in the cold light of day. It’s Easter Monday, after all, and we’re probably all sick and tired of talking with family and might need a break to draw us back to the real world of work and politics, the world away from photos of pets and appeals for sympathy on account of a chocolate overload.

If the government is having a hard time getting vaccinations into people’s arms, and has (we’re told) fallen short of its goal by a wide margin, how much more complex to make each and every person who uses each and every social media platform – submit genuine IDs at a government-run office. And how much more unlikely that Service NSW (for example) or Centrelink would be able to gauge the authenticity of the documents thus tendered for scrutiny by one bleary-eyed functionary or another.

Even if you did get all the correct documents put before the censor and a message sent via an official channel to Twitter’s head office in California, as soon as you’d gotten the routine up and running there would be a news story about a fraud. A woman assaulted by a former partner who’d used subterfuge to get hold of her residential address, a late-night murder perhaps (in the worst case) carried out by an old lover with an axe to grind and with an anonymous account that the government had (incorrectly) said was really a school lteacher.

And what of anonymous accounts? What of the federal minister? Wouldn’t she be able to operate anonymously if she wanted to, given that opening and operating that account would require the use of ID? Why shouldn’t a prominent person who finds the rough-and-tumble of Twitter a bit hard to take – even on the best days – opt for a less bruising method to engage with the demos? If ID were required, surely you’d still be able to have an anonymous account?

The scale of the operation is what’s missing from accounts like that published by the SMH. When the government opened up its purse at the beginning of Covid’s remake of the public sphere, all you had to do was go to Centrelink and report the fact that you were out of work. The money came directly thereafter into your bank account – registered with the authorities for just such emergencies. There was no scrutinising. There were not delays. You weren’t asked to sign a statutory declaration stating that you’d lost your driver’s licence. You didn’t have to go to the post office and apply for a passport.

A passport? Takes two weeks to get a new one if you have all the necessary documents on hand. But say that you have to go to Births, Deaths and Marriages and ask for a new birth certificate? What then? More delay? Meanwhile, in your absence, Twitter continues to spew out a tone of rebarbative bile each and every second, a flow making a mountain of unwatched – except to a few – messaging. A rugged butte made of aggression and spite. A headland of reheated verbiage that quotes TS Eliot and Camus and Orwell at a more than alarming rate. A cornucopia of derivative cliché. A cascade of bumptious kitsch.