Not just X: Social media will always be a battlefield
Once upon a time on social media, the nicest app of them all, Instagram, home to animal bloopers and filtered selfies, established a land called Threads, a hospitable alternative to the cursed X, formerly Known as Twitter. X had been taken over by the Dark Lord Musk, he who reopened X’s gateway to its banished demons Donald Trump, Kanye West and Andrew Tate.
The good people of X tried to flee, scattering to the hinterlands of Mastodon and Bluesky, whose distant confines they then complained about on X.
But Threads would provide a new refuge. It would be Twitter But Nice, a Good Place where X’s liberal exiles could gather around for a free exchange of ideas and maybe even a bit of that 2012 Twitter magic — the goofy memes, the insider riffing, the meeting of new online friends. A place where learnings and conversations were almost better than IRL engagement.
The best treehouse ever
As more participants joined Threads, a palpable enthusiasm, even merriment, broke out; it was like watching a schoolyard of kids unleashed from detention. We’re going to build the best treehouse ever!
“All right, let’s do this thing,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted. “May this platform have good vibes, strong community, excellent humor and less harassment.”
And now, after a mere 10 months, we can see exactly what we built: a full-on bizarro-world X, handcrafted for the left end of the political spectrum, complete with what one user astutely labeled “a cult type vibe.” If progressives and liberals were provoked by Trumpers and Breitbart types on Twitter, on Threads they have the opportunity to be wounded by their own kind.
Threads’ algorithm seems precision-tweaked to confront the user with posts devoted to whichever progressive position is slightly lefter-than-thou. It knows, for example, exactly where on the left you stand with regard to the Middle East; gender ideology; diversity, equity and inclusion; body positivity; neurodivergence; COVID; and the creative industries; and shows you posts screaming from whichever position is just far enough from your own to drive you out of your mind.
In this microverse, arguments you probably didn’t know existed (“Every time I see a white person in a kaffiyeh, I wonder: How much have you studied the issue?”) devolve into accusations around tokenism, solidarity and identity. There is something guaranteed to offend anyone who wants to get offended. Confessions of emotional upheaval and mental health crises operate like a kind of currency, a surefire way to accrue cred.
“Threads is a great example of how the left gets in its own way by parsing absolutely everything and anything anyone says or writes that is mildly positive or not negative enough or blah blah blah,” noted another user.
Triggering everyone
My phone’s Face ID still regularly fails to recognize my face, but within days, Threads managed to gain access to the deep recesses of my amygdala. I wasn’t even threading, but it was immediately apparent that the thread somehow wound its way in. Rather than display the cat content I seek, its landing page defaulted to an algorithmic “For you,” and what Threads thought was “for me” was a tailor-made stream of trigger bait.
I’d log on and be faced with ludicrous Princess Catherine trutherism, painstaking purity tests to weed out the merely progressive from the resolutely anti-capitalist, and furious debates over who is the most anti-Zionist in the precisely correct way.
But it wasn’t just me. “Threads seems to be purposely pushing content that opposes your personal beliefs & values — Thus getting everyone TRIGGERED,” one user wrote. “They intentionally show you stuff you dislike,” another complained. “The more you try to block certain types of voices the more they show it to you.”
This month, novelist Daniel Torday posted, “This space has become almost as unusable as twitter was. I’m out.”
“I posted something that was read in bad faith by a person I respect,” Torday explained a few weeks later by phone. He deleted the offending post but still worried. “I don’t know if this kind of social media is usable. It might just not be possible.” Threads seemed to him what Twitter was like two years ago.
“There’s some kind of algorithm that’s dusting up the same kind of outrage that Twitter had,” he said. “Threads feels like it’s splintering the left.”
Our worst aspects
But where else to go? You could skulk back to the Other Place. You could red-pill over to Truth Social, where reposts go by the unnerving term “ReTruths” in a cosmos devoid of people interested in factbased reality. You could cover your bases, cross-posting on Bluesky and Mastodon, Reddit and Threads.
According to social media analysts, the kinds of debates that used to animate Facebook and Twitter are retreating into private group chats. The fragmentation of social media may have been as inevitable as the fragmentation of broadcast media. Perhaps also inevitable, any social media app aiming to succeed financially must capitalize on the worst aspects of social behavior.
And it may be that the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, history’s cheery optimist, was right: “The condition of man is a condition of war of every one against every one.” Threads, it turns out, is just another battlefield.