How Twitter is fuelling America’s culture war

It looked like the clearest case of good vs. evil one could ever imagine, said Daniel Mccarthy on Spectator.us. A brief video clip of a Washington march this month showed a frail Native American veteran surrounded by jeering white teenagers in “Make America Great Again” caps, one of whom stood only inches from the man’s face, “grinning in silent insult”. Social media instantly lit up with outraged calls for the teenage villain to be identified, expelled and shunned for life as a racist pariah; the boys’ high school issued a formal apology. But then a longer video emerged that cast the stand-off in a completely different light. It showed that the boys had endured prolonged racial and sexual slurs from a nearby group of Hebrew Israelite black separatists, before the Native American veteran chose to march into the teenagers’ midst and start banging a tribal drum in one of their faces.

The extended footage does add some complexity, but it doesn’t exonerate the boys, said Ruth Graham on Slate. It shows some of them performing “tomahawk chops”, dancing and sneeringly mimicking the Native American man’s chanting. At best, that’s offensive; at worst, racist. Sure, a couple of boys acted badly, said Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, but let’s not try to justify the dangerous rush to judgement over this story. “A smirking teen’s face, something known to every parent and schoolteacher in the world”, was held up as the symbol of all that was wrong with America; one commentator even went so far as to describe the expression as emblematic of the “tactics of genocide”. Come off it. It’s ridiculous overreactions like this that are “going to do in the Left”.

And the rest of us, too, said John Podhoretz in the New York Post. It’s time we all faced up to the fact that social media “is corrupting our rational judgement”. The dynamics of Twitter encourage shrill partisanship at the expense of considered thought. You get to “enjoy the tiny dopamine rush that comes not only from venting anger, but from the performative aspect of that anger as it is expressed on social media – safe in the knowledge you are far from any consequence that the public expression of your anger might provoke”. One of the pundits who went on an outspoken Twitter rant about the boys, and who subsequently apologised, was a technology journalist who, of all people, should know how misleading the internet can be. I have no idea how Americans will find the restraint we need to limit the damage social media can cause. But our democracy depends on it.