Is Twitter over?

Last updated on: February 22, 2016 at 4:13 pm by Jane the Actuary

Is Twitter over? 2016-02-22T16:13:45-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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I am, as it happens, relatively new to twitter, having started only in 2014, a year or so after I started blogging. It’s a very useful tool, both for staying informed with headlines and links from news outlets and bloggers alike, and for promoting one’s own material. And the fact that you can follow anyone you like means that I do, in fact, follow a few lefties as well as the usual crowd of conservatives.

One of the “tricks of the trade” is, in fact, to tweet a link to one’s blog post, with a clever line, and, by means of “mentioning” tweet-ers with larger audiences, hope for a re-tweet from them. But lately that hasn’t been as effective as in the past in bumping up reader counts, which seems to suggest that the 54,000 followers of @instapundit, for instance, aren’t checking twitter as often as they did even just a couple months ago.

And then, in relatively short order, Twitter announced the formation of the Trust and Safety Council, and a significant voice of the Right on twitter, @rsmccain, was banned. Now, Robert Stacy McCain, who blogs at theothermccain.com, has as his particular focus exposing the nuttiness of feminists, especially on-campus, and one approach he often takes is simply to follow feminist writers on twitter, an in their tumblr blogs, and share what they have to say, and comment on it rather bluntly. He doesn’t hesitate to say that a certain writer is “crazy,” which is not necessarily my cup of tea. With respect to the claims of sexual assault epidemics on campus, his statement is that male college students should simply never date on-campus, lest they be unjustly accused. And he had quite a bit to say about “GamerGate” which I admit I never followed.

As it happens, he had previously established a separate account, @SexTroubleBook, for promoting his recent book of the same name, so he began tweeting under that account, for all of a day or so until this one was banned.

The reason for the banning? According to McCain, Twitter says it was due to violating “rules around participating in targeted abuse.” But they haven’t identified specific tweets that crossed a line. Robert Tracinski, writing at The Federalist, connects a few dots:

Only a few weeks earlier, Twitter had announced the creation of a “Trust and Safety Council,” to which it appointed Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist known for denouncing “sexism” in video games, a prominent figure in the Gamergate controversy—and oh yes, a frequent target of criticism from McCain. So it sure looks like the moment Twitter gave Sarkeesian the power to do so, she started blackballing her critics.

“Da Tech Guy” speculates further than more actions are to come:

I talked to Stacy Last night (more details tomorrow) and we noted that Twitter’s actions in an election year reminded us of other leftist business like Salon or the endeavors of Tina Brown which habitually hemorrhaged money for their investors but served the purpose of reinforcing the memes of the left in culture meaning that the lost was not so much a financial hardship but an investment in the culture wars.

I submit and suggest that this is what is going on here. Stacy McCain is the test case and with a candidate even worse that John Kerry at the top of the ticket you will see Twitter acting decisively to suppress conservative opinions on their platform and by the time election day rolls around you will see things that will make his banning look like a kiss in the cheek.

And William Jacobson at LegalInsurrection.com flatly says, “Conservatives are prisoners of Twitter”:

There is no viable alternative to Twitter at this moment. The shear breadth of membership and ease of use is not available elsewhere. Facebook is not a substitute, with its islands of pages and likes.

That’s a problem. A big problem.

Sure, you can quit Twitter, but good luck getting your message out without it, or hearing the messages of other conservatives. Twitter is the modern phone wire system, without which individual phones are isolated and irrelevant.

So what happens next?

There are alternatives to Twitter, though I’ve never had any interest in them — reddit.com, for instance, or discussion board-type sites like redstate.com. Perhaps a twitter-alternative quickly takes shape — though it’s not as simple as someone programming a Twitter-like website that conservatives gravitate to; such a site needs capital, and a lot of it, to operate its servers.

Can Twitter management be shamed into relenting, or will they be emboldened?

It’s always been the case that, as a private company, Twitter, and Facebook, can shut down any messages they wish. The problem is that, because of the great advantages of commonality, they have become monopolies in their space. And that’s worrisome.

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