NYT’s Maggie Haberman on Scaling Back Twitter Use: It’s Become an ‘Anger Video Game’ in the Trump Era
With exception of breaking news and my own stories, taking a break from this platform. No reason or prompt other than that it’s not really helping the discourse.
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 15, 2018
In an article today at the New York Times, correspondent Maggie Haberman explains her recent public departure from Twitter (above), and it is a scathing rebuke of that it has become.
Haberman does not at any point in this insightful article lay blame on President Donald Trump, or anyone else, as the sole cause of the decline in the quality of discourse or the product that is Twitter. It’s important to note that right from the start, before it gets distorted on Twitter. The article is not about about blame.
But Haberman does note, correctly, that the change happened during the Trump era. Everyone, including President Trump and including the media, are necessarily part of the problem, though to one degree or another; that’s the very nature of the platform.
“Twitter has a staccato allure for those of us who need frequent inputs and have grown accustomed to them in the Trump era, with news cycles that last roughly three hours,” she writes.
That the news cycle is short and there is always new controversy may be something a Trump partisan blames on the media, or something an anti-Trump partisan blames on the president, but the fact that this is the case should not be in dispute, and Haberman is not just correct to observe it, but also risking that exact partisan anger for saying so. Because, as she also correctly writes, “motive-questioning” too has become a rule rather than exception online.
“The viciousness, toxic partisan anger, intellectual dishonesty, motive-questioning and sexism are at all-time highs, with no end in sight,” she observes. “It is a place where people who are understandably upset about any number of things go to feed their anger, where the underbelly of free speech is at its most bilious.”
Again, that is a sword that cuts in all directions, and rightly so.
“Twitter is now an anger video game for many users.” says Haberman, in a vivid but instantly understandable (at least to other Twitter users) metaphor. “It is the only platform on which people feel free to say things they’d never say to someone’s face.”
“For me, it had become an enormous and pointless drain on my time and mental energy,” she explains.
Still, on the topic of Trump’s various and significant contributions to this problem, Haberman is clear about which of them stands out.
“More significant [than tone drowning out news] is the way Mr. Trump has tried to turn everyone around him, including the journalists who cover him, into part of his story,” she says. “And people on Twitter have started to react to me in that same way, treating me as if I am a protagonist in the president’s narrative. I found myself in the middle of swarms of vicious Twitter attacks, something that has happened to many other journalists in the Trump era.”
This is another fact that does not care about your partisan feelings. This is an observable phenomenon.
The column is worth reading top to bottom, even for those with a Twitter-grade attention span. As a matter of interest, a cause for concern, or even as just another thing to argue about online. But all the better if one spends a few minutes thinking about how and why it has come to this. And what it means for us as people going forward.
And for speech.
[Featured image via screengrab]
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