Twitter Rewards & Punishes Incivility

Do you use Twitter? Have you ever wanted to have a post go viral? Being unkind is probably the way to go. The most ‘viral’ thing I’ve ever done on Twitter was to make a non-supportive comment on Bernie Sanders’ tweet. I got so much flak from that I had to change my settings! And I wasn’t even rude or nasty or anything. It’s just that Sanders’ fans don’t appreciate anything other than Sanders-worship.

Tired old ex-celebrities have found their tweets unignored when they venture forth with unhinged comments about how Pres. Trump’s children ought to be murdered. As long as they are progressive ex-celebrities they will probably not have their Twitter account suspended. (If they did, they’d just make a new Twitter account and continue as before.)

Personally, I don’t see why anyone should call Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama or Donald Trump a POS when you can just say ‘bless his heart!’ and mean more or less the same thing. We live in a world full of unhinged people. Civility is a safety measure.

But if you are regularly uncivil in your Twitter life, and if you are some flavor of conservative or Republican, and you are NOT Donald Trump, the Twitter gods are likely to punish you. You may lose your account or be ‘shadowbanned’ or, as I have recently heard, you may find yourself following someone/something you would never follow voluntarily. I have seen this happen to people I know who are kind, decent people— people I would turn to for help if reconstituted Nazis were hunting me. 

Since neither the progressive nor the conservative movements are monolithic entities where everyone thinks the same, I’m sure there are progressives who have been persecuted by Twitter for not saying the right— or Left— things. In fact, I’m sure there are those in the Twitter beast that are madder at the deviant progressives than they would ever be at we mere conservative ‘haters.’ 

So what is a tweeter to do? If we are too polite, our tweets will be ignored and disappear into silence. We will lose our chance to be of influence. But if we are ‘spicy,’ even if in a mostly civil way, we’ll be guilty of hate speech, deplatformed and silenced. Sometimes our words will be grossly misinterpreted in order to make us guilty. 

I have no answers, other than to be flexible. Don’t put all your internet ‘eggs’ into one Twitter or Facebook basket. Have a blog, have a Gab or MeWe account, try something different. Spread your effort out in more than one place. It’s highly unlikely you will be suspended from Twitter, Facebook, Gab and MeWe at the same time, and also have your blog taken down. And if you blog— consider compiling some of your more ‘evergreen’ blog posts into an ebook on Smashwords, or even a printed book. Banning a book is harder than taking down a Twitter account or a blog.