The Piano Lab

tldr: Twitter is a list of things to think about. Just like news agencies create small content packets to keep us in news cycle, so does twitter. Why? because people still bring their lists from news or elsewhere, which you read. And so it ends up being on your list by transmission. i.e. if a useless event happens and someone watches discourse on the news and posts on twitter, and you read it, you still end up thinking about it. Which is what the news does: Give you things to think about.

Hi

There’s a great many good things about Twitter/X. Or atleast about some spaces on twitter. People can find and connect with other people with or working on great ideas or opportunities, so much faster than anywhere else. When vetted properly, it is also a really fast way to access information, including some news.

This post is not about any of that. It focuses on how the platform also lends itself to the same use for crystallization of public opinion, as the news media.

Brain

Basically, our brains are thinking machines. Part of the machine is to give the machine, what to think about. This can be done through both self generating thought (imagine sitting in a room with just yourself for a couple of hours, and thinking based on what you already know), and external input (external stimuli, sensory experiences including listening to sounds or reading). I do not know exact percentages, but say in the beginning it is 50-50. 50% of the brain does the thinking, and 50% tells you what to think about. For simplicity, it creates a list of things to think about in your RAM or working memory.

Now, no matter of efficiently you do the thinking, it is still about items on the list. For example, if the external input is such that you have Porn on the list, no matter how great the thought, it’ll be about porn. Similarly, if the list is, political ideas embedded in Victorian porn, no matter how great the idea, it’ll be about that. The thing is, these items on the list can be very small subsets of actual aspects of an issue. This fact is used by anyone who wants to control any type of conversation.

And anyone who’s ever gotten triggered at any point in their lives, knows how emotionally charged things can easily shorten and focus the list. Ironically, I suspect therapy also involves this control of the list for many types of issues. But what happens when 50-50 turns into say, 80-20? And the 20, is dominated by external input? From a control standpoint, this is what you’d want.

Same Same

So, by bombarding and repeating the same ideas and analysis about an issue, over and over, twitter forces you to have the same things to think about an issue as everyone else. This is literally what news media also does. Synchronize and homogenize mass opinion.

1. Twitter is one way traffic, garbed in a two way traffic. Why? Because in addition to the central idea of list control, over half the people are readers, not tweeters. There are about 100 million twitter users in the US. That implies, you’re atleast teaching 20 million people what to think about, especially when it comes to analysis of a national issue. (The number may be off, but the point remains).
2. The twitter account roon recently talked about how there now seems to be more content from limited number of channels, compared to less content but from a wide variety of channels on twitter. This essentially primes the platform to mass information campaigns, including political ones. And while twitter is democratic in that this would, in theory, allow more and more people and orgs to establish mindshare, and branding. But in practice, it provides the exact same opportunity to already powerful organizations and agendas.
3. Another hypothesis is that extreme opinions get reacted to faster than normal ones. Since twitter prioritizes engagement now, this combined with prioritization of content, essentially means more people see and form opinions through extreme content, often through a narrow range of channels or thought space. Content creators, part of various types of organizations, know this.
4. A final aspect of this, is something that was implicit in news media, but is explicit on twitter. Support. The comment sections to tweets are places where there’s safety of agreement i.e. other people agree with this analysis and opinion, therefore it must be right. For news media, we implicitly also understood that since the news media organization still exists and hasn’t been burned or shut down, the information it broadcasts must be supported by other members of the tribe.

I’ve talked about the idea that essentially all of this occurs in seconds when one scrolls through twitter, making it impossible without conscious thought to understand the risk of forming opinion there. The beauty of it all is that if someone controls the what, the illusion of control over the ‘how to think’ remains with the ‘listener’. There’s some theory to this in comms theory.

Twitter is a platform of opinions (often extreme), not news. Not that news media are news. But it’d be important to know the difference, especially people who’re coming of age in the last 10 years. That there’s no vetting of what is popular or what you’re learning from.