Twitter once corrected the narrative; now it authors it

“What is the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?” the president of the United States asked 10 years ago at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “A pit bull is delicious.”

I bring up this decadeold riff to explain the joke that is Twitter.

The “hockey moms” reference was a shot at Sarah Palin, who had famously joked that the difference between pit bulls and hockey moms was “lipstick.” But Palin wasn’t the actual butt of Barack Obama’s joke — he was. Two weeks earlier, Daily Caller blogger Jim Treacher posted an article noting that Obama admitted in his memoir “Dreams From My Father” that he had eaten dog when he was visiting family in Indonesia.

Treacher’s point was to push back on the combined obsession of the Beltway media and the Obama campaign with an old story about how Mitt Romney — Obama’s 2012 opponent — used to go on driving family vacations with his dog in a kennel on the roof. New York Times columnist Gail Collins alone mentioned the incident at least 70 times.

But neither the Times nor any other mainstream outlet had mentioned this literal man-bites-dog story, despite the fact it had become a massively viral political meme, thanks primarily to Twitter.

And yet Obama felt he had to address, and perhaps defuse, the firestorm.

The right-wing bloggers — including yours truly — who responded to nearly every Democratic attack on Romney with “yeah, but Obama ate a dog” were just having fun and pointing out that the mainstream media’s monopoly on which dumb controversies should be taken seriously was over. Twitter offered a correction to the asymmetric advantage the mainstream media had over the narrative.

And, back then, I loved Twitter for it.

Now, Twitter — and social media generally — is the narrative. And as Jonathan Haidt recently argued in the Atlantic, this change has led to the stupidification of much of American life. Because virality is the currency of the realm and nothing fuels virality more than outrage, Twitter is an open spigot of outrage.

When we tweeted our “Obama ate a dog” jokes, the president responded with some jokes of his own. Now the joke is on us. Under Donald Trump, covering the presidency and the president’s Twitter feed were two sides of the same coin. His presidency brought in, or taught, a whole generation of young Republicans to treat Twitter (and cable TV) not merely as if it matters more than governing, but that it is governing.

For the right, Twitter is still the battle space for insurgency against the establishment. For the left, it is the establishment. Twitter is overwhelmingly liberal — which explains much of the liberal panic over Elon Musk buying it. According to Pew, 10% of users generate 92% of all tweets, and 7 out of 10 of these users are liberal.

Because Twitter reinforces ideological conformity by swarming dissenters, elite liberal journalists and policymakers alike confuse consensus among themselves on Twitter with popular consensus. Joe Biden fancies himself a moderate, but his administration takes its cues from a platform that might as well be a poll of Democratic primary voters in D.C.

I still use Twitter. But it no longer brings much joy. Having a sane conversation there is a bit like trying to play chess in a mosh pit. Ironically, I do enjoy tweeting about my dogs (and I don’t mean recipes) — in part because dogs don’t care about Twitter.