No, I’m not going to do yet another parody of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. Since there have been so many, I would have to do an especially good one, and I don’t have anywhere near the confidence to think that I can.
I’m just referencing it as a way to introduce a problem that’s troubling me.
Like many others somewhat to the right of the center, I abandoned Twitter some time ago. My history with the site, I imagine, was in many ways typical. I had built up a number of followers, roughly 40,000, and then one day started to see them mysteriously and slowly disappear in tranches. I don’t remember the exact numbers—it’s been a while, and I wasn’t paying close attention—but the subtractions were in the thousands, going on over time.
I did write the company about this but heard nothing. What was I to do? Sue them? What a waste of time and, of course, money. Besides, I was never given a blue check—not that I asked—when I had probably written close to as many books and movies as anyone on the site. (I should shut up about that.)
Also, it was pretty obvious even then to anyone paying the slightest attention that Twitter was a left-wing propaganda organ, with conservatives and libertarians being allowed some diminished presence so that it could claim to be even-handed when it wasn’t.
So I left. After that, I occasionally wrote pieces here on The Epoch Times, urging my colleagues to do the same, to undermine the social media company economically. We were sleeping with the enemy, I said.
Few, if any, listened. I can’t say I really blamed them. They naturally wanted to promote their work to a large audience, not to mention joust with the more egregiously biased lefties, some household names, whose almost always dishonest tweets were infuriating.
I wanted to do that too, although I realized that it also was in the waste of time category. Few went to Twitter to learn anything or discuss rationally, only to show off or take potshots at their enemies.
Of course, I didn’t realize at that point the degree Twitter had become an FBI and, in all probability, a CIA front. Who would want to be part of that?
Now, new owner Elon Musk has done an immense public service, exposing the operation for what it was, going so far as to say, in a podcast, of the Twitter conspiracy theories, “So far, they’ve all turned out to be true and if not more true than people thought.”
Musk is clearly cleaning house. More kudos to him. And more information, please.
But is it time to go back?
Not so fast, grasshopper.
For all his brilliance, I believe Musk may have made one overall mistake. He bought Twitter, he avers and I have no reason to doubt him, to create a town square for all Americans, a place we can all reason together for the greater good.
But is that even possible? In today’s world, today’s America, I’m afraid that it isn’t. We’re nowhere near mature enough for such a thing. Quite the contrary—whatever its intentions, Twitter, indeed all social media, will remain a playground for our worst impulses where, devoid of real human contact to meliorate them, those same negative compulsions can only thrive and increase.
Or am I wrong? Perhaps I’m overly cynical about social media, biased by the harm it does to our children. And I write as someone who was rather recently blocked by Facebook and Instagram—permanently, as far as I know—for reasons that are totally opaque, since I rarely went on Facebook and only once went on Instagram, as far as I can recall, and never left a message. Go figure.
So back to square one.
To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in ...
(Oh, never mind).
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