MTG's account delenda est
Good behaviour on social networks comes from disciplining the most popular and powerful
Earlier this week Marjorie Taylor Greene (aka “MTG”), the Congressional representative for Trolling, Georgia, tweeted a short extract of video featuring Dr Rachel Levine, the Pennsylvania Secretary of Health, responding to a question. Levine is a trans woman. Greene doesn’t seem to like trans women, and quote-tweeted the video with Levine’s pre-transition first name—a tactic unpopularly known in the trans community as “deadnaming”—and a slightly childish but also gruesome bit of imagery. I won’t link to it, but she’s easy to find on Twitter, and for reasons we’ll come to, the tweet’s still there.
People on Twitter, as they will, gasped in outrage, which encouraged Greene to follow up just under 10 minutes later with another bit of deadnaming and the same imagery, for good measure sprinkling in the provocative use of “he” for Levine.
None of this was accident; Greene constantly casts around for topics to wind people up about. She doesn’t seem particularly concerned with whether what she’s saying is fair, or true; what matters is getting a reaction. In that sense, she’s a one-woman social warming fusion reactor, smashing ideas together as hard as she can in the hope of achieving ignition and a self-sustaining reaction from her million-plus followers to whatever she’s done.
In this case, the reaction was quickly damped down by the intervention of Twitter’s moderators. Had an “ordinary” user written those two tweets, it’s a very safe bet that Twitter would have taken them down, and quite possibly suspended the account until they were removed. Experiments have previously shown that this was the case for Donald Trump’s tweets: in Social Warming (you can now order the paperback! Out July 28!), I recount how in June 2020 someone set up an ordinary account to tweet the same things as Trump did. Guess how long it took before the account was suspended. (Answer at the end1. No cheating.)
But for Greene? As a member of Congress, she gets the kid-gloves treatment. She wasn’t suspended or required to remove the tweets. Instead Twitter “restricted visibility” of the tweets and prevented Likes, retweets or replies. So users of the Twitter app/site would see this..
..except that they’d also see the tweets themselves, underneath those underwhelming warning boxes. And quote-tweeting was still possible, which as you can bet, people were more than happy to do.
Mistakes were Made, but Action was Taken
Still, this showed that Twitter had Taken Action, and yet also meant that Greene’s Free Speech Wasn’t Infringed. So, nobody’s totally happy but nobody’s totally unhappy, so everybody’s a bit annoyed, so, uh, mission accomplished? After all, Greene is an elected representative; doesn’t that mean that she gets to say absolutely anything she wants, even if it breaks the rules?
No. Of course not. And this milquetoast approach to running a community is why Twitter is so reviled by so many people. Restricting replies and retweets but allowing quote-tweets is like saying the house is only half on fire, so everything’s OK. Facebook does similar when it “limits” the spread of untruths: it’s usually too late. I only found out what had happened hours later, and I don’t really watch American political Twitter closely. The fact I found out at all speaks to how ineffective Twitter’s action was.
There was naturally plenty of criticism of what was done. “This begs [he means “raises”—Ed] the question “who does Twitter serve?” noted Jared Holt, senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who looks at US hate and extremism. (Greene thus falls through the ceiling and right into his wheelhouse, many times a week.) “If the powerful get a lane without rules, then the service is clearly not designed with a user-first approach.”
To which insight one might say: welcome to the party, pal. The Twitterkomi Plaza is indeed not the shining beacon of orderliness that it might appear from the outside.
One of the strongest, and best, criticisms of Twitter’s decision came from Derek Powazek2. What marks Powazek apart from most of the people who comment about communities and moderation on the internet is that he has been there, done it, got the T-shirt, and written the book long before today’s social networks were a gleam in anyone’s eye.
What he learned, and wrote about in his 2001 book “Design for Community”, is that pleasant communities don’t just happen; they take planning and work and, especially, sanctions.
Powazek’s thread on this occasion was powerful, and brutally honest. It started thus:
It continued: “The core mistake Twitter is making is they think that newsworthy figures shouldn't have to follow the rules you and I follow, but they're wrong. In fact, it's the opposite. Famous (or infamous) people should be held to a HIGHER standard because their use will be mirrored.”
2: “When high profile users are allowed to break the rules, it shows that the rules don't really matter. So long as Twitter keeps allowing this, they are creating the environment they claim they're fighting against. Example content is always more important than stated rules. ALWAYS.”
3: “The only solution is to boot the offending users. It's how communities have always defended themselves from bad behavior. If you yell in the library, you get kicked out. If Twitter cared about "conversations" as they claim, they'd boot MTG [Greene] and everyone else who breaks the rules.”
4:, 5: “So to answer to the original tweet's [by Holt, asking “who does this serve?”] question, Twitter does not serve its users or its community (nobody wants to see this shit). They don't really even serve their advertisers (no advertiser wants to get mixed up in drama like this). That just leaves......Twitter. Twitter leaves this shit up because it makes Twitter seem important. The Twitter leadership wants to feel like Twitter is the center of online conversation and they don't care about the quality of that conversation or about the damage it does in the world.”
6: “It's ego, pure and simple. Self-aggrandizing ego. Look how important we are! We must be important - look how the ants swarm around us.”
7: This is why I've always pushed back when people say "Twitter is the public square!" No, it's not. That's what the executives say to let themselves off the hook for creating a toxic waste dump. Stop being grandiose. Twitter is just a website.”
8: “Twitter is a social website that humans use. That means it needs rules. And that means members need to be shown the door when they break those rules. This isn't new to digital spaces. Twitter execs pretend its hard to understand because doing it would hurt their fragile egos.”
9, 10: “And because Twitter execs make bad decisions to fluff up their fragile little egos, we have actual monsters like MTG using the platform to foment hate here every day. People will get hurt and die because of it.
They already have. There will be more. All because Twitter is too chickenshit to enforce their rules consistently.”
Advertising on the sewage plant
The idea that you’d police your most popular users more strictly than the rank and file would shock most social networks, because they absolutely do not. Only the other day an anonymous member of Twitter testified to the US January 6 hearings into the insurrection, saying that yes indeed, people inside the company saw his tweets as directly responsible for those events, but that even in late 2020 when concerns had been growing inside the company about his incitement, executives did nothing because they liked what he brought to the platform: “I believe that Twitter relished in the knowledge that they were also the favourite and most-used service of the former president… and enjoyed having that sort of power within the social media ecosystem.”
This is the mutual toxicity that grows from special treatment. Trump and Greene say outrageous things; because of their status, the media is drawn to report on the outrageous things. And some people at the extremes are drawn to act on the outrageous things. The outrageous things now become semi-normalised, and so those seeking to break through apathy have to tweet ever more outrageous things. I’d hazard that an analysis of Greene’s output over the years would find a tighter and tighter cycle of attempts to garner attention, greater use of emotive words, more attacks on enemies or perceived opponents. Great business for Twitter, which can claim to be a hub of current events while selling itself to advertisers as the place where everything’s going on. But it’s a bit like advertising on a sewage plant.
The harsh truth is that Powazek is right: if you really want to break the cycle, you need to be brutal with those who can or do have the most influence. If Greene had been suspended until she deleted the tweets (as happens to most people who break the rules as she did), there would have been a big standoff. But there’s no law saying that Twitter must provide a service for politicians. Twitter has already proven that by suspending Trump. It needs to do the same again. Delete her account.
Got a view? Leave a comment.
• The paperback of Social Warming comes out on July 28! Or get the hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
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The Trump-copy account was suspended in less than three days spanning a weekend, for “glorifying violence”. The offending tweet that caused the suspension: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” When Trump tweeted those words, Twitter left it up but flagged it as “glorifying violence”. Well spotted, moderators.
I have no idea why or when I began following Powazek. But it would have been well before there were algorithmic “recommendations” for this sort of thing; who you found and chose to follow used to be totally organic, sometimes emerging from community exercises such as “#followfriday”, in which you’d recommend a few accounts to your followers who you thought merited it.
It would be wonderful if, somehow, one could reconstruct the creation of the social graph over time, and wonder: why this person, why then? The story it would tell of one’s own changing attitudes might be educative as well.