Right now, Bluesky, the X alternative, has 23 million users, and by the time you read this, it will have even more. Forgive me if I do not get too excited.
Human beings have always been capable of viciously insulting those who do not agree with them. Try reading some of Martin Luther’s writings, including the one where he suggests that the Pope “might be struck down by lightning and thunder, burned by hellish fire, have the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, the plague of St Anthony, leprosy, carbuncles and all the plagues.” The man for all seasons himself, Thomas More, in turn, suggested that Luther was only fit to lick the rear end of a urinating she-mule.
Letters and books, however, can be left unopened. Digital connectivity invades every aspect of our lives. There has been lots of gushing about how Bluesky is like the good old days of Twitter before Elon Musk destroyed it. That would be the Twitter where men posted photos of teenage girls stolen from their social media accounts with vile ratings and comments? Or perhaps the Twitter where the comments were so horrific that an Irish woman, her Brazilian partner and their 22-month-old son felt forced to emigrate from Ireland because they had the temerity to appear in an advertisement for Lidl?
There may have been some Edenic period between 2006 and 2009 before the retweet button, but if there was, it ended then.
Children, there once was a time when you had to laboriously copy and paste a tweet, and add RT and the original poster’s handle. The additional effort meant that at least some thought was put into retweeting. The retweet button removed that helpful pause and the age of the internet pile-on was born. Chris Wetherell, who built the instant retweet button launched in 2009, likens it to handing a four-year-old a loaded weapon. Twitter became a place for angry people to engage in hate spirals long before Elon Musk.
[ ‘After a year of horrendous bullying I avoid almost all social media’Opens in new window ]
The chronically online, especially journalists, became obsessed with Twitter, even as it descended into a welter of bots and disinformation. But it took Musk’s takeover and rebranding as X to begin to drive them from the platform. The flight from X has been primarily of left-leaning people seeking less toxic spaces. Some of them seem blithely unaware that they may have contributed anything to the toxicity themselves by their furiously flying fingers.
Already, people are worrying that this flight will lead to more polarisation and bigger echo chambers. But where is the evidence that being exposed to alternative views on Twitter/X led to any mutual understanding in the first place?
In 2018, a journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), offered a large group of Democrats and Republicans financial incentives to follow bots that retweeted messages by elected officials and opinion leaders with opposing political views to see if it would decrease polarisation. Predictably, it entrenched rather than softened viewpoints. It has long been known that intelligence does not protect from motivated reasoning – interpreting reality in line with an established identity or set of prior beliefs. Smarter people just come up with more sophisticated arguments as to why the evidence does not, in fact, contradict their cherished stances.
Humans were never meant for hyperconnectivity. Sociologist Rogers Brubaker defines hyperconnectivity as “everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time”. It has changed everything from how we construct a sense of our own identity to how we conduct politics.
[ I gave up on X because of the drip, drip of casual racismOpens in new window ]
Robin Dunbar, the Oxford anthropologist, posits that we only have the cognitive capacity to deal with 150 relationships and of those, only a tiny number, perhaps five, will be truly close. Dunbar’s thesis is disputed but we know that we have limited capacity for real human connections.
The dopamine-driven distraction devices glued to our hands have just increased our loneliness. Jen Hogan wrote about how hard it has become for women in their 40s to make friends who live close by, have similar interests and time to meet up. It is not just women in their 40s. Given the difficulty of making real friends, it may seem odd to suggest that our friend circles should also include someone with different views.
Friendship is the only true antidote to polarisation. It is less easy to hate someone with baffling ideas when you know and like them as a person. Workplaces used to provide that but, increasingly, people self-mute unpopular views or work from home.
Politicians, despite public posturing, often still manage perfectly cordial relationships in private with ideological opponents.
Regarding polarisation, the real question is not whether to stay in the toxic swamp of X, or migrate to Bluesky. Pascal once posited that all the troubles of humankind stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Today, he might suggest that our troubles stem instead from the inability to sit and quietly chat in the same room with someone whose political and ideological views we do not share. Twitter was not that room; neither is Bluesky.