The world that Twitter never made

Apparently Haidt had no recollection of the 60s, cities on fire during the civil rights era, civil rights leaders shot, presidents shot, one because a guy wanted to impress Jodie Foster, students on campus shot in Kent State, Jonestown or any of the other gazillion insanities of American cultural life. The last ten years have been, by comparison, mild.

Twitter is at the end of the day an entropy generating noise machine of the chattering classes and an epiphenomenon. Internet iscourse is a product not a cause of conflict at the material level and as far as it historically goes relatively boring these days.

The Russia-Ukraine war is all over the platform, for better or worse. It annoys me that people are resorting to disaster tourism, popcorn in their hands, whilst watching the world burn. Stop being an armchair activist, and get out there and make a dent whilst you still can. A small retweet of something you think is important means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...

I do think the author was paying attention to the news in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s.

In my part of Europe, if journalists and politicians didn't use it like their English speaking counterparts do, it would be as relevant as Google+.

> "Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009."

Social scientists have reproducibility problems in their work, so that's more like an ideological opinion than anything else, but if we take it as given, here's the gist of the response:

> "First, social media (and Twitter in particular) cannot account for a societal wide decline in trust or a societal wide rise in radicalism and partisanship. The number of active twitter users is just too small... Second: the better explanation for declining institutional trust is declining institutional performance... Third, what we call “cancel culture” is not a new feature of American life. It has always been with us."

Another possibility is that the chattering classes believe they're more important than they are, and more fundamental economic and ecological factors are behind the deepening cracks in the facade of social stability. A society divided into wealthy pockets and impoverished wastelands is simply not a stable society, and the ecological impacts of resource exhaustion and climate extremes certainly aren't helping with the resilience factor.

The combination of economic and climatic stress has destroyed entire civilizations in the past. Modern technology (for example, the ability to dig deep wells for water, the ability to generate power via different means if one source is exhausted, etc.) can buffer this to some extent, if there's enough social cohesion to ensure that technological benefits are available to all. Otherwise, the historical record points to civil war being the most likely outcome.

First claim that social media can't be responsible because less than 50% of the us population use twitter, but that ignores the other social media platforms 70% of americans use facebook [1], the author has cherry picked a specific social media platform so they can hand wave it.

The second and third argument is simply acknowledging that political correctness is a tribal thing and that younger generations who are more likely to use social media are now deciding whats politically correct.

This is all fine but the author then assumes that the millennial's are making decisions based on boomer iraq war policies not the social media platform they use daily, the author provides no evidence or reason for this speculation / conclusion.

The only thing that supports the author is that they have correctly identified tribalism but we already know we are more tribal and radical the question is why . The authors answer is the iraq war and policies from the 90s but most zoomers have never heard of this and most millennial see it as history. Millennials don't spend their time reminiscing about boomer wars, this is a very boomer perspective on current events.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-...

>The story of baby boomer extremism could be told by analyzing networks of professors and students on elite campuses—but if that story did not also mention Vietnam, Watergate, the end of the civil rights movement, or the 1970s energy crisis, the average reader would conclude that the essayist had lost that decade’s thread.

My personal take has been that our problems have less to do "free speech" and "media decisiveness" and more to do with how America's economic system today has left most people on the edge of destitution and are left people too tired to engage meaningfully with politics. There is a huge chasm between the policies we actually need and what gets debated about daily. I would consider this a leftist position, so I'm excited to read what this author proposes.

[1] https://www.city-journal.org/our-problems-arent-procedural