Twitter is indeed a very strange thing. I have mixed views on it.

The character limits clearly contribute to the fact that it's so overrun with drama. It literally prevents anyone from writing a long form, nuanced thought, let alone an essay. Yet this is also why it's so popular - it lowers the bar to a point where everyone can take part on a level playing field, without feeling outcompeted by skilled writers who have time on their hands (consider how few people blog vs tweet). And you know, the original dream of the internet was that everyone could publish, everyone would be a creator. With things like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, we're there. The internet achieved that dream. It just turns out that sometimes what people create isn't very appealing. Well, that's humanity. It's hard to criticise the internet or social media for that.

I think Twitter has had another effect, which is that it's revealed to the whole world, practically for the first time, the extent to which the social elites are no better thinkers than anyone else and often seem to be worse thinkers.

Historically, certain social classes have been able to work together to present a very polished, very glossy exterior. This was especially noticeable with politicians and corporations before the Twitter age where people often complained that they were fake, spoke in soundbites, were just faceless party apparatchiks and so on. Journalists would claim a moral high ground in which they claimed to be totally politically neutral and trustworthy, bureaucrats and academics would claim to be scientifically disinterested in anything except their narrow domain and of course completely above any suggestion of bias or impropriety, corporations would only speak in terms of carefully worded press releases, politicians would change their positions totally and claim they hadn't changed views at all, and so on.

But now every politician, journalist and half of the corporate world blurt out whatever random thought pops into their head to the entire world without a seconds hesitation and it's recorded forever. And guess what, journalists turned out to have extreme political biases, many academics turned out to have crazy opinions on everyday topics, government bureaucrats likewise, a politician who contradicts themselves will be immediately skewered by some ancient YouTube video of them saying the opposite, and so on. The whole facade of intellectual neutrality fell apart completely once Twitter gave us direct insight into the minds of these people.

To take an example from a couple of days ago:

https://order-order.com/2019/02/20/adam-boulton-accuses-tory...

Boulton is a Sky News journalist who is required by UK law to be politically neutral in his reporting, yet here he tweeted that he believed members of the government that support Brexit (i.e. all of them, given their manifesto commitments) are "far right". So now people see this sort of tweet, and next time Sky News tells them about the "far right" they'll remember this tweet and recall that these people believe the UK is in fact run by an officially far right government. And then they'll ignore it.

Is this for the better or for the worse? I think it's for the best. Yes, it leads to a lot of outrage and drama for a whole lotta years as people adjust to the idea that every segment of society that claimed to be trustworthy isn't, and a whole lot of new groups and ideologies jostle for power and prestige in the vacuum that remains. But in the end social media didn't create this problem, it just revealed what had always been true.