Twitter may be a dumpster fire. But it was our dumpster fire

“Being on Twitter right now is like being at a going-away party in a house slated for demolition,” University of Calgary executive Corey Hogan. posted on Monday.

That’s kind of the vibe there this week. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the internet’s most prominent troll, has bought Twitter and many users are sure he is in the process of destroying it. People are sharing contact information and giving laudatory addresses and indulging in whole streams of “remember the time” nostalgia. Maybe it’s goodbye. Or maybe it’s just more tweeting.

You might not be on Twitter — or not much, anyway. So you can shrug your shoulders before his possible demise. I, on the other hand, am a guy who live-tweeted the birth of one of his children. My career in journalism developed in the age of Twitter and was partially pushed by it for a while. I’ve felt the endorphin rush of partying there and the depression of abuse there. I used to like it. I have often hated it. But I found it really useful, as a journalist and as a citizen.

If it goes, I think the quality of our public discussion may diminish.

What a strange sentence to type. I mean, this is a place justifiably infamous for being a conduit of misinformation-fueled abuse and trolling, a place of cancel culture mobbing, an endless source of backbiting and ideological purity testing.

Putting up with those things was the price you paid for accessing the benefits of Twitter. The extent of these benefits hasn’t always been as in-your-face as the drawbacks.

At its most entertaining, it was like a giant cocktail full of jokes and insights in equal measure. You can eavesdrop while you are smarter, smarter or more informed people than you were discussing important matters or thinking about meaningless things. You can join their conversation, start your own, sometimes even make friends.

But that aspect, which diminished over time, paled next to Twitter’s function as a public news network, where you could see live, real-time photos and on-the-scene reports from events happening anywhere in the world. You can immediately put all of this into context from legitimate experts (academics and scientists and researchers and senior policy activists) or the newsmakers themselves (politicians, athletes, celebrities).

For a journalist, this is a great benefit. We can share our work there, too, and see the good, the bad, and the ugly (sometimes very ugly) feedback. Its usefulness on that front faded over time: it was never a huge source of web traffic, and as more people responded to headline displays rather than clicking links, the signal-to-noise ratio in mentions ours fell accordingly.

But it long retained its usefulness as a resource for discovering things. Donald Trump and his followers made Twitter famous as a mass spreader of misinformation. But it was also just a mass disseminator of all kinds of information. Too often the reliable facts you needed to debunk the lies spread by Twitter were right there, accessible to you because of Twitter.

And it was especially useful for local news. In Twitter’s earlier years, corresponding to Rob Ford’s years as Mayor of Toronto, a large community of journalists, activists, policy pundits, bloggers, politicians, academics, and various everyday residents tweeted using the hashtag #topoli (short for Toronto Politics). It was an endlessly helpful source of live reporting, background information, details on the mayor’s comings and goings, and discussion of issues big and small.

Some people, like current Star columnist Matt Elliott and current Canada editor Jonathan Goldsbie, rose to prominence based on their participation in that Twitter scene. Smaller publications and blogs, even council committee reports reached a wide audience there. A typo tweeted (“canx”) by the Star’s David Rider became a local joke. Norm Kelly, the conservative-leaning septuagenarian deputy mayor at the time, became a world-famous friend of Drake’s.

And what grew on Toronto Twitter was an active, informed and engaged community.

A lot of energy and interest has already been drained from that local political community on Twitter in recent years. A lot of energy has been wasted by Twitter, period. Like many people, I long ago went from being a “power user” to a “power eavesdropper” (as I saw someone put it, their observation disappeared upstream before I noted its specific source ).

At a certain point, toxic interactions became too high a price to pay. Through retweets and tweets, even a civil dispute can suddenly turn into what felt like an angry mob. Those interactions, broadcast to your home at all hours via notifications on your phone, were often brutal, threatening and hateful. Women and people of color and those on the LGBTQ+ spectrum were subject to campaigns of targeted harassment and bigotry.

Even for many of us spared the worst, the cocktail party too often felt more like a drunken brawl.

Twitter’s long-standing challenge has been to balance the value provided by the world’s vast information free-for-all against the toxicity and real danger some users bring to it. Bad voices drive out good ones – causing those users who add the most value to the community to leave.

The fear now — almost the expectation, it seems — is that Musk is determined to let the most toxic voices run wild, so none of the more valuable voices will be willing to stick around (especially if he insists on trying to ‘charge them to make their contributions). If it goes this way, it will be a real loss.

Twitter has been a giant dumpster fire, to be sure, a constant source of noxious fumes and scorching heat. But for all that, she also shed a great deal of light. Even saying good things to the first, if it goes I will mourn the loss of the second.

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