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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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In terms of twitter itself, I think engaging with bad leftist arguments is actively harmful, even if you are obviously correct to anyone who reads your rebuttal. The reason I think it's harmful is that the reach of a tweet is related to how strongly people engage with it, where "reply" is a particularly strong form of engagement. Thus, by refuting a tweet, you are also boosting it.

If lots of people refute batshit insane takes and ignore or merely like sane takes, the result of that is that the typical Twitter feed will be full of batshit insane takes, and people will make the observation "the current societal consensus seems batshit insane to me, but it seems like everyone agrees with it. Maybe I'm the one who's wrong". Mostly they will not read the comments rebutting the batshit insane take (yes, I am aware that the concept of being "ratio'd" exists, but I don't think the majority of Twitter users take that strongly into account).

This is a good point if you're specifically talking about Twitter, but it doesn't generalize well. If every ordinary person kept their head down away from bad politics, politics would be dominated by the most fanatical and unreasonable people who made it the most unpleasant to debate them. (To make a Douglas Adams reference, there is a theory that this has already happened.)

I agree that this is Twitter-specific, but also I think Twitter specifically is probably responsible for somewhere around half of the instances of "someone sees a terrible take". Consider how many news articles seem to be a couple paragraphs of commentary around a screenshot of someone's batshit takes on Twitter.

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