Is Twitter worth it?
By: Dr Ct
Tags: Right Wing, Australia, Left Wing, Journalism, Misogyny

Twitter — Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay

This morning reading Leigh Sales’s twitter experience brought back so many memories from few months ago. My friends always told me I use twitter a lot, compared to them, yes I was a more active user of twitter, however I never considered that I was addicted to it. I had two accounts for almost a decade now, one with my academic affiliations and other for my personal opinions. It was during the second lockdown of Melbourne when I felt stuck. It was twitter that provided a magical portal to dive into the virtual world and get distracted from the realities of life. Till March 2021, I was so grateful for this platform and became heavily dependent on it for my daily happiness. Only after being trolled and attacked viciously and non-stop for months by a gang of trolls who seemed to have nothing better to do with their time, I had to pause momentarily to reflect on its value all over again.

Some of my colleagues, close friends and mentors all were of the opinion that I should let go of my personal opinion account. So that’s it, that’s the solution, tell a woman to back off and let the trolls win in silencing her. I decided to continue, women have to claim their space on twitter just like the real world. Someone has a problem with my opinions, that’s their problem, they are more than welcome to unfollow me or block me. I also started to appreciate that I had the choice to move away from all this, the women in public office or journalism have to rely on these platforms as part of their jobs.

When an “alt-right” white supremacist tell you via website Breitbart, “the solution to online ‘harassment’ is simple: women should log off [the Internet]” (Yiannopoulos 2016)” To every woman on twitter, NEVER LOG OFF!

Since last year I started making notes about my personal experiences on twitter when I started following the #auspol for the first time. I am a qualitative researcher and my approach to twitter was cyber ethnography. Over the period of time I learnt that twitter does operate on the game behind the numbers rather than the actual context or the truth behind the post. Once you know the rules of the game, it’s very easy to manipulate them. Number of followers, likes, retweets, they define what will be on the trends, and not many will have the time to verify the facts. Only by connecting to the online communities over a period of time can one clearly see the virtual eco-systems of arbitrary groups of like-minded accounts, gathered around a few influencers (or hashtags) of their choice, sometimes living within their own eco-chambers.

Numbers are not everything but they do provide an overview of what is happening in this little cyber colony of accounts, whether genuine, verified, sock puppets, bots and/or trolls. Like it or hate it, it is a fascinating world within cyberspace. I am extremely grateful to Tim Graham for providing the historical data set on journalism during covid-19. To map it to my personal ethnographic data collected during that time period, and writing those experiences as academic articles is taking longer than I anticipated. You have to do research, the actual ‘research’ that requires academic rigor, evidence and justification for peer review. A work in progress at the moment …

After reading Leigh Sales’ experience in today’s article, I decided to put together a short snippet or a summary of the numbers from only the last seven days (8–14 September 2021 retrieved through TalkWalker).

This graph only represents the mentions of twitter handles of selected five male journalists and five female journalists. This does not include yet the indirect references or use of name instead of twitter account handle. Leigh Sales at the moment is the recipient of the top negative sentiments on twitter.

Looking at the demographics of those tweeting about these twitter accounts, for female journalists, it is dominantly men from 18–45 who are providing their opinions.