1675: Two Negatives Make Even More Negatives

Today has been one of those days where I’ve been considering jacking Twitter in altogether. What was once a friendly, fun, enjoyable place to hang out — and a place where I’ve been able to make a lot of friends I otherwise would never have come into contact with — is rapidly becoming an echo chamber filled with people that I don’t particularly want to associate with. It’s becoming somewhere where I don’t feel particularly welcome.

I shan’t get into details as the latest spate of Twitter outrage is plastered all over the Internet and really doesn’t need any more publicity, but I will say that, as usual, both sides of the argument in question are acting like complete tools. There’s the aggressive, unpleasant, filthy undercurrent of the Internet supposedly harassing people for their beliefs and supposed transgressions, and on the other side, the people defending themselves and their friends often stoop to personal insults, hypocrisy and outright ranting. Anyone left in the middle, wanting to take a rational viewpoint on the whole thing, is left branded as an awful person regardless of how much sense they’re actually speaking — if you don’t stand on the side of the group that has painted themselves as the “good guys” then you’re worthless human garbage, no better than those that are supposedly sending “death threats”. (And don’t even get me started on the semantics of how that term is liberally misapplied.)

At the core of this never-ending parade of outrage, argument and public shaming is a group of people who claim to believe in “social justice”. Who wouldn’t want to stand up for social justice, right? The trouble is that the term “social justice warrior” has picked up severely negative connotations owing to the behaviour of some of these people supposedly fighting on the side of equality, freedom, all that good stuff. Which is daft, when you think about it — as previously noted, who would say they were against social justice?

And yet the criticisms of many of these “social justice warriors” and the way they go about their business are often valid. They use aggression, harassment, sweeping generalisations, public shaming — many (though, it must be said, not all) of the tactics they are quick to condemn the seedy underbelly of the Internet for — to get what they want. Disagree with the way they do things and you’re “tone policing”. Disagree with some of things they are saying and you are a misogynist, sexist, transphobic, terrible person who should be hounded until the end of time until you apologise, and then hounded further when you are forced into an apology because it somehow wasn’t good enough. The people involved make this group huge, influential — and quite often in possession of a really quite unpleasant mob mentality.

I’m utterly sick of it. I don’t care. It sets me on edge. It makes me anxious. I’m nervous about even posting this in case one of these armchair activists gets hold of it and decides to twist my words into something that doesn’t even resemble what I originally said — as happened to YouTube personality “TotalBiscuit” earlier today.

This surely isn’t what these people want. This surely isn’t a good way to go about raising awareness of social issues. Certain quarters of Twitter now scare me and make me feel like I can’t talk about certain things for fear of reprisals — from the side that paints themselves as the forces of Good. I’ve done my best to ignore, unfollow and even block the people who are most unpleasant about all this, but it’s still not the friendly, welcoming place to hang out that it once was. And that really, really sucks.

I’ve culled my Following list by a hundred people this evening. If that doesn’t filter out this never-ending, anxiety-inducing noise, I’m setting my account to private. If that doesn’t work, then it’s time to say goodbye to Twitter — for good this time. I wouldn’t be the first from among my group of friends to do so — for these exact reasons — and I probably won’t be the last.