Friends, reporters, fam: It’s time we journalists all considered disengaging from the daily rhythms of Twitter, the world’s most damaging social network.
You don’t have to quit totally — that’s impossible in today’s news business. Instead, post less, lurk more.
“Never Tweet” is an ironic meme on Twitter, a thing people in media say to acknowledge how futile it is to consider ever leaving this place where all news happens first. I want to suggest another meaning: “Never Tweet” should be an aspiration, a necessary step toward improving the relationship between the media and the digital world.
[Farhad Manjoo will answer your questions about this column on, yes, Twitter on Thursday at 2:30 p.m. Eastern:
@fmanjoo.]
Of course, I’ve climbed onto this very high horse because we just witnessed a terrible week on the internet. Over the weekend, thanks largely to amplification on Twitter, MAGA-hatted high-school kids from Kentucky — and whether they did or did not harass a Native American elder during a march in Washington — eclipsed all other news. At first, the Twitter mob went after the kids from Covington Catholic High School. Then, as more details of the incident emerged, a mob went after the people who’d gone after the kids. No one won; in the end the whole thing was little more than a divisive, partisan mess.
So it was just another weekend on Twitter. But in its zigs and zags, the Covington story made one thing clear: Twitter is ruining American journalism.
The Covington saga illustrates how every day the media’s favorite social network tugs journalists deeper into the rip currents of tribal melodrama, short-circuiting our better instincts in favor of mob- and bot-driven groupthink. In the process, it helps bolster the most damaging stereotypes of our profession. Instead of curious, intellectually honest chroniclers of human affairs, Twitter regularly turns many in the news — myself included — into knee-jerk outrage-bots reflexively set off by this or that hash-tagged cause, misspelled presidential missive or targeted-influence campaign.
But Twitter isn’t just ruining the media’s image. It’s also skewing our journalism. Everything about Twitter’s interface encourages a mind-set antithetical to journalistic inquiry: It prizes image over substance and cheap dunks over reasoned debate, all the while severely abridging the temporal scope of the press.
In the initial rush of outrage about the Covington kids, before many details were in, many in the media — many of whom have since confessed they should have waited a little longer — got caught up in the fracas. They said things they shouldn’t have. They shut down dissent, chilling more measured thinking, because the tide of Twitter umbrage narrows one’s gaze and discourages empathy. There’s never any time to wait to get out your take: fear of missing out, which is Twitter’s primary sensibility, requires that everyone offer an opinion before much is known — because by the time more is known, Twitter will already have moved on to something else.
I don’t care to litigate the events concerning the Covington kids. I have read and watched at least a half-dozen accounts, and in the Rashomon haze of smartphone-captured clips I am still not sure what exactly happened. The story seems complicated enough to merit careful analysis, which was unsurprisingly nowhere in sight the few times I checked Twitter this weekend.
I will confess that when I first saw the video of a smirking teenager staring down a drumming elder, I, too, was stirred to outrage. My politics lean against the kids’, and something about their smugness and certainty — they seemed to be doing tomahawk chops and were wearing hats supporting a racist president — confirmed all my priors about the ugliness of our Trumpian times.