The tyranny of the Twitter mob
How the social media battlefield is changing the intellectual landscape
IT’S NOT THE POPULATION OF STUPID TWITTER-LAND THAT’S STUPID, BUT RATHER THE CULTURE OF INTIMIDATION AND CENSORSHIP THAT THEY’VE CREATED THROUGH GROUPTHINK. POLITICS NOW ‘ TAKE PLACE IN A CONTEXT THAT CAN BEST BE COMPARED TO A HIGH SCHOOL CAFETERIA’
Ajournalist friend of mine recently attended his four-year-old daughter’s year- end dance recital here in Toronto. “Every dance was in some way about Canada,” he told me. “My daughter’s dance was Canada Geese. Another was Aurora Borealis. One dance was Our Aboriginal Peoples. And I’m like, ‘Oh, God, no.’”
“It’s one of the youngest classes — very basic. No real theme, just introductory dance moves. The costumes are evocative of animal skins. The hair buns have little feathers. The t heme was ‘ Honouring t he first people of North America.’ And I was freaked out. It was objectively innocent, benign, cute and even touching — and it was absolutely well-intended. But I’ ve spent so much time in Stupid Twitter- Land that I expected the parents to stand up and start booing and hissing and calling for the studio owner’s head.”
“No one did that, of course,” my f riend added. “Normal people don’t do those things.”
In a 1945 essay, Notes on Nationalism, George Orwell described a rumour among leftists that the real reason American troops had been brought to Europe was to suppress English communism, not fight the Nazis.
“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things l i ke that,” Orwell famously noted. “No ordinary man could be such a fool.” Even by Orwell’s high standards, those words have aged extremely well. Tell an ordinary Canadian schlub that white people aren’t allowed to quote Beyoncé, and he will be smart enough to laugh in your face. Dress down a superbly intelligent Peace and Conflict Studies PhD candidate for the same act, and she will fall over herself with apologies.
I refer here, of course, to federal NDP leadership candidate Niki Ashton, who back in March tweeted “Like Beyoncé says, to the left. Time for an unapologetic left turn for the # NDP, for social, racial, enviro and economic justice.” The Vancouver chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted a demand that Ashton retract her appropriation of Beyoncé. And she complied, meekly replying: “Not our intention to appropriate. We’re committed to a platform of racial justice + would appreciate ur feedback.”
It seemed like a cowardly response to a silly demand, and many said so at the time. Then again, what were Ashton’s options? Clearly, she needed the backing of groups such as Black Lives Matter to stake out her legitimacy as a champion of the hard left. And since Canadian champagne socialists now take their cues on identity politics from Twitter, losing BLM would also mean l osing f undraising opportunities as well. So no matter what Ashton might have believed privately about her right to quote Beyoncé’s Irreplaceable (written jointly by an American and a team of Norwegians), the smart play was outright capitulation.
This is what my friend meant by “Stupid Twitter- Land.” He is not talking about Regular Twitter- Land, which ordinary people use to get news headlines and sports scores. Stupid Twitter- Land is a strange place where a local advocacy group with 950 Twitter followers can leverage an obscure grievance to force a humiliating show of cultural submission from a woman who, theoretically, could become the next leader of a G7 nation. It’s not the population of Stupid Twitter- Land that’s stupid, but rather the culture of intimidation and censorship that they’ve created through groupthink.
Many i ndigenous, black, feminist and LGBTQ advocates will tell you that social media has democratized the marketplace of ideas, and broken a mainstream- media oligopoly once ruled over by middle-aged white guys like me. They’re absolutely right. And that’s a good thing. When I got into journalism 20 years ago, my newspaper’s editorial board looked like the junior varsity version of a Donald Trump cabinet meeting. That world is gone, in large part thanks to the “identity politics” activists that cranky white cultural critics are always complaining about.
But without intending to, Twitter’s culture warriors also have created what might be described as a sort of crowdsourced ideological autocracy. And paradoxically, the public figures who are most consistently victimized by it are creatures of the left, such as Niki Ashton — since these are the same figures whose legitimacy as politicians, activists and writers depends on the moral judgments of Stupid TwitterLand’s most ruthless enforcers.
Understanding how all this came to pass means looking past the dynamics of the online world — for the pathologies that have taken root on Twitter are rooted in changes in the increasingly impoverished bricks- and- mortar world of workaday publishing and academia. In t he good old days when a young columnist, copy editor or adjunct professor could aspire to a job with a pension, and a middle- class life on a leafy street, it made sense to avoid fights and play nice with your peers. But in a world where starving artists go online every day with that lean and hungry look, being right — or seen as right — often is the only thing that matters.
In a recent column titled Twitter is destroying America, American columnist Damon Linker complained that politics now “take place in a context that can best be compared to a high school cafeteria — the largest, most raucous high school cafeteria in human history. At the centre of the room sit the popular crowd — the reporters, editors, and pundits who work for the most prestigious mainstream media outlets in the country. Everyone else in the room wants their approval and attention, including the right- wing trolls seated at the burnout table in the corner, and the geeks who toil away on public policy at universities and think tanks, and more ordinary scribblers like me, who write for slightly lesser-known magazines and websites.”
I like Linker’s high- school cafeteria metaphor. But from my Canadian perspective, I’d say that his description of who sits at the popular table is off. Elected politicians and established mainstream media figures — such as, say, Andrew Coyne, Susan Delacourt and John Ibbitson — may have tens of thousands of Twitter followers. But they have not positioned themselves as leaders or whips within ideological tribes, so they cannot command flocks of followers to exact mob justice upon heretics. On the Internet, as in real life, this is where real power lies: the power to make others feel pain.
Moreover, being figures of the establishment, mainstream writers are viewed with suspicion by the 20-something Twitteratti rank- and- file who serve as shock troops in any effective online mobbing campaign. The organizing principle of identity politics is passive aggressive: The more actual power one is perceived as having in a society suffused with sexism, heteronormativity, white supremacism etc., the less moral capital is ascribed to you. ( It is only when the mobbing reflexes of these movements are triggered that the group dynamic phaseshifts suddenly into naked aggression. This may shift back to passive aggression if the object of the attack responds by blocking her aggressors — with the mob now playing the collective role of wounded victim. Depending on the identity of the prey, such cycling may play out through several iterations before the force of the attack is spent.)
And it must be acknowledged that many of Twitter’s most active left- wing cadres came by this view of society’s moral hierarchy honestly, having endured online attacks from racists, Islamophobes, homophobes and misogynists who, though culturally marginalized in this country, can be intimidating nonetheless.
From my time as editor- inchief of a left-leaning Canadian magazine, in which capacity I had to monitor the online response to my content, I can attest that the true enforcers of Twitter’s journalistic gossip chamber aren’t exactly household names. Many are quite young, and have relatively few followers. What they do have are markers of authenticity that allow them to speak authoritatively on matters of race and gender. They also tend to inhabit professional domains that signal a devotion to purity of thought and cause: artists, academics, musicians, street activists, poets.
The most effective specimens combine more than one of these categories, or may present themselves as especially authentic representatives of their class. This has led to some surreal rock-paperscissors moments in Stupid Twitter- Land, such as last year, when two well- known Toronto writers of colour had an online fight about whether the lighterskinned of the two was capable of adequately giving voice to the experience of racism. In Vancouver, similarly, traditional feminists and transgender advocates have attacked one another on social media over the question of whether a local woman’s lending library should include books by authors ( such as Catharine MacKinnon) whose ideas are now denounced as inadequately supportive of trans rights. Like Bolsheviks and Mensheviks shouting at each other across café tables in the interwar period, these true believers often reserve their harshest recriminations for fellow travellers who have lapsed into some minor form of apostasy.
When I was a magazine editor, my colleagues would never become more seized by terror than when it was discovered that a First Nations poet, be they famous or obscure, had tweeted her displeasure at something we had published. It was a microcosm of the fear and malaise that now grips much of the Canadian community of arts and letters more generally: There is not one star in its entire firmament whose professional status cannot be threatened by small, ad hoc coalitions of intellectuals and artists whose names are entirely unknown to ordinary Canadians.
Indeed, this is the reason why the debates over issues such as cultural appropriation are so one- sided: It may take a day or two for Twitter’s tastemakers to crowdsource a moral judgment. But once they do, there is little room for dissent. And then everyone — from the wealthy men and women who run the champagne speaking salons, down to the humblest activist with an egg avatar — is expected to fall into line.
One of the most unsettling experiences I had at my magazine took place following the 2016 dismissal of University of British Columbia creative writing chair Steven Galloway, after he was accused of sexual assault by one of his students. None of the accusations against Galloway have been proven in court, and so I naïvely imagined that it would be uncontroversial to publish an article by memoirist Carmen Aguirre that stood in support of the principle of due process and innocent-until-proven-guilty — especially given that Aguirre herself is a woman of colour who knows the horror of sexual assault first hand, having been raped at gunpoint as a young teenager. Yet by the time her article appeared, the fix was in: Stupid Twitter-Land had decided that any defence of Galloway effectively was tantamount to misogynistic hate speech. Aguirre was tarred as a rape apologist. Several colleagues warned me that publishing it would compromise our reputation with literary A-listers.
The author, to her great credit, persevered anyway, and included this extraordinary salvo against her critics. “The left is in shambles in North America. And the Galloway controversy reveals why,” Aguirre wrote. “It has become the new puritanical church, shaming, bullying, condemning, and expelling anyone in its ranks who is seen as taking a misstep. It has become victim to its own victim stance, choosing to see oppressors and enemies within its own membership.”
What Aguirre and other heretics of the Canadian intelligentsia have discovered is that, for all their avant- garde posturing as social-justice revolutionaries and champions of the oppressed, Stupid Twitter-Land’s enforcers are fundamentally reactionary in outlook. Which is to say, their most savage treatment is reserved for members of their own ideological clan who dare to mate outside the tribe. Hal Niedzviecki — the author and editor who was excommunicated after writing a magazine editorial supporting cultural appropriation earlier this year — is a good example. The man’s name now has become a byword for political incorrectness. But in just about every other respect, Niedzviecki is a reliable leftist. When a friend of mine who worked at this newspaper met him a few years back, he initially recoiled in horror lest the Post’s rightleaning ideological taint rub off on him like some kind of dermatological pathogen.
Because my former magazine’s staff and many of its journalistic contributors are drawn from the ranks of Canadian literati, I was able to perform a close and detailed observation of the real-life human habits and appetites that lie behind the practice of Twitter mobbing. Having done so, I’ve developed some sympa- thy for the denizens of Stupid Twitter- Land — even the trolls. A lot of these people are brilliant writers who have spent their lives toiling in obscurity. Whole years may pass during which they will write a book of poetry, or an academic thesis, that perhaps only a few hundred people will ever read. The privilege that I am putting on display here — the right to author a long essay in a national newspaper — isn’t available to most of them. But thanks to the three-way combination of social-media technology, the moral urgency of identity politics, and these intellectuals’ hallowed status as wordsmiths, they now have a chance to gain a wide audience — and even impose their moral judgments on others. It is not hard to see why they would jump at this chance.
It’s also the case that the world of arts and letters now looks a lot like Uber or eBay — an increasingly physically disconnected world that is woven together by email and social media. Many writers and editors never see one another in person, with each toiling in their respective basements or nearby coffee shops. The normal, everyday watercooler social lubricants that help encourage everyone to give each other the benefit of the doubt are absent. And so innocent or satirical comments are seized on as evidence of ignorance or malice.
Basic expectations about how people relate to their professional organizations no longer hold true. When I broke into this business 20 years ago, editors at newspapers or magazines were far less well- known than they are now. There was no Twitter back then. So if your name didn’t appear on the masthead, and you didn’t write books or columns, it was likely that no one in the general public knew your name. Some of this country’s greatest editors passed through their entire careers in almost complete anonymity.
All of this began changing with the rise of Twitter. Suddenly, everyone in the media, no matter what their job, could attain a species of daily celebrity — even if it was largely confined to industry circles — by broadcasting their ideas and critiques on social media. Human nature being what it is, these individuals quickly coalesced into tribes — whose contours didn’t always correspond to their place of employment.
At the same time, wages within the journalism industry flatlined, and job security eroded. So there was less motivation to toe your boss’s line, and more motivation to go rogue and focus on your own digital brand. Your boss could take away your paycheque. But she could never take away your followers.
When I interview young journalists today, very few of them still dream of a career that will allow them to buy a house. Many still live with their parents, have little in the way of savings, and don’t care much for cars or other expensive possessions. Their greatest asset is their reputation within their peer group — a peer group that they do not define according to their alma mater or place of work, but rather their place of politics, which they curate obsessively on social media.
When they watch their likes and retweets and such, they are like investors of old watching a stock ticker. To lose status on social media is, for this cohort, a form of bankruptcy. That’s why they run scared from controversial opinions, pressure colleagues within their organization to respect the Twitterenforced party line, and join the pack against excommunicated heretics. In this environment, each of them secretly knows that they could be next.
Nor can all of this be treated as a compartmentalized online phenomenon that has little bearing on the world outside of Stupid Twitter- land: The pathologies that now have become normalized on social media are beginning to metastasize to the real world.
In May, when a CBC manager was accused of posting an insulting Tweet in regard to cultural appropriation, he was not only attacked on Twitter, but also, days later, in a CBC meeting room. Corporate brass convened not one, but two public shaming sessions where the man was made to sit shame- faced, for several hours, as his colleagues described the psychic pain wrought by his single tweet. ( The manager had asked to perform his apologies personally, in private. This request was denied.) The unsettling similarity to a Soviet confession ritual was unmistakable. And this sort of spectacle would have been seen as completely beyond the pale just a few years ago. Thanks to the influence of Twitter, pre- scheduled mobbing sessions have become a normalized part of the human- resources toolkit at our national broadcaster.
A few weeks ago, shortly after I left my magazine gig, I had breakfast with a well- known Toronto man of letters. He told me his week had been rough, in part because it had been discovered that he was still connected on social media with a colleague who’d fallen into disfavour with Stupid Twitter-Land. “You know that we all can see that you are still friends with him,” read one of the emails my friend had received. “So. What are you going to do about that?”
“So I folded,” he told me with a sad, defeated air. “I know I’m supposed to stick to my principles. That’s what we tell ourselves. Free association and all that. It’s part of the romance of our profession. But I can’t afford to actually do that. These people control who gets jobs. I’m broke.
IF I PUT FOOD ON THE TABLE FROM WRITING BUZZFEED COLUMNS, OR WERE UP FOR COURSE RENEWAL AT A LOCAL JOURNALISM SCHOOL, THIS PIECE OF WRITING WOULD NOT EXIST. BULLYING, CONDEMNING, AND EXPELLING ANYONE IN ITS RANKS WHO IS SEEN AS TAKING A MISSTEP
So now I just go numb and say whatever they need me to say.”
My friend’s financial situation isn’t an incidental detail here. Observe the arenas where many of the most vicious Twitter mobbings now occur, and you will find intellectuals who have made extraordinary financial sacrifices to pursue their artistic or activist passions, and whose entire livelihood hinges on a thin patchwork of government grants, modest book advances, sessional teaching contracts, and honoraria from small journals, websites and magazines. Just one wrong tweet or misplaced open-letter signature can send these people back to a life working for Uber or foodora.
This essay you’re reading: There are probably a thousand other writers in Canada who have some draft version of it on their hard drive or rattling around their brain. The only reason it’s my byline sitting at the top is that, by luck and good fortune, I’ve attained enough financial and professional independence to step outside the system. If I put food on the table from writing BuzzFeed columns, or were up for course renewal at a local journalism school, this piece of writing would not exist.
Glib comparisons to Stalinism — which too often get thrown around in manifestos such as this — are of course overblown: The Writers Union of Canada and the University of British Columbia Fine Arts faculty do not operate gulags. Nevertheless, the idea that a whole career can fall victim to a single social-media message sent in a moment of anger or frustration — or even a bad joke — has produced an atmosphere of real terror that is compromising the art and intellect of Canada’s most creative minds. One can detect this effect in the souldead language and boilerplate phrases that writers instinctively adopt when they join the mob against others, or beg the mob for mercy by confessing their thoughtcrimes. We live in an age of irony; yet when the mob comes knocking, playfulness falls away from language, and all communication is reduced to the slogans of ideological tribalism.
What’s worse, our audience is suffering — because instead of producing content of interest to readers, listeners and viewers, the profession’s finest minds are primarily focused on avoiding mob censure. That is why there is such a sameness to the themes and causes celebrated in many of the special projects and personal essays that now appear in the media. On Twitter, the most doctrinaire takes on fashionable themes are greeted with praise, which pleases writer and editor alike. But web-site page-view data suggest that, among rank-and-file audience members who don’t live in Stupid Twitter-Land, the market for such fare is glutted.
This is the world that Canadian writers inhabit in 2017. It is a sad and scared place. Everyone knows this, and most will admit as much when they are quite sure they are among trusted friends. But since the solution requires collective action that cuts against the self- interest of the dogmatists who now dominate Twitter, there is no obvious path to a systematic solution. Nor does such a campaign have any obvious leader. ( Since the very fact of this essay’s existence will make me a popular target among trolls, even my friends would agree that I am uniquely unqualified for the role.)
So all I can ask is that people reading this give a thought to how their use of social media is shaping the broader intellectual landscape in this country — and that other writers consider lending their voices to the effort. Civility and empathy are qualities I’m trying to channel when I send a tweet these days. On my best days, I even manage to pretend that the people behind those Twitter accounts are real, live human beings.