Some further thoughts on Twitter

The first round of observations was so popular (especially on Twitter!), I thought I'd add a few more based on things I've learned and observed the last couple of months.

1.  I came across this interesting chart via Justin Weinberg's blog, which shows that the vast majority of U.S. adults do not use Twitter at all (thank God!), and that usage varies, unsurprisingly, by generation.  38% of those 18-29 use Twitter (the highest percentage), while only 7% of those over 65 use it.  I'm in the distinct minority in my age range (only 17% of those 50-64 use it), and I mostly use it to provide links to the blog for the benefit the readers who now follow the blog by Twitter. 

2.  This data is consistent with an e-mail shared on Twitter awhile back by the journalist Jesse Singal: 

"[T]he vast majority of both psychologically healthy and accomplished philosophers stay off twitter like their life depends on it. The vast majority of people I know in academic philosophy either ignore, mock, or disdain philosophy twitter." - professional philosopher in email

Although many Twitterati reacted with rage and denial to Mr. Singal's tweet, the claim about "the vast majority" is consistent with the data about usage by age alone.  (Are the non-users psychologically healthier and more accomplished?  Probably, but the preceding data are neutral on that.)   I strongly suspect that relatively few non-Twitter users "mock or disdain philosophy twitter" (although that would be a warranted response were they to look), and that most simply ignore it. 

3.  It's certainly true that the vast, vast majority of philosophy faculty are not on Twitter.   Look at any PhD-granting program, or any undergraduate school, at random, and you'll find typically only one or two faculty using Twitter, if that, and even fewer active users.  The contrast with academic law is striking.  At Chicago, at least half my law colleagues are on Twitter (this is not atypical for law faculties either), whereas not even a quarter of my philosophy colleagues here are on Twitter.   What explains the difference?  Here's my best guess:  journalists make very heavy use of Twitter (it's hard to find a journalist who doesn't have a Twitter account, although I've not looked systematically).   Law faculty are often sought out by journalists for their expert opinions about legal matters, so law faculty find it an effective way to connect with journalists.

4.  Obama used to joke that if he only got his news from Fox, he wouldn't have supported himself, since the person portrayed there was a caricature, spiced up with fabrications and misleading spin.  A segment of philosophy Twitter, dominated as it is by ferociously "woke" philosophy faculty and especially students, does to me what Fox did to Obama.   As I observed awhile back to a colleague elsewhere who was surprised by this (she was the one who actually coined the apt term "wokerati"), this is partly generational:   most Twitter users are too young to remember when I started warning students about “sexual predator faculties” back in 2009, or led the charge that same year for the APA to actually enforce its anti-discrimination policy with respect to universities that discriminate against gay men and women.  

5.  What now gets me in trouble with that Twitter crowd is that I also believe in academic freedom (including for those with "unwoke" views), which is one reason I gave attention to the “gender critical” feminists in the UK like Kathleen Stock and Sophie Allen.   The wokerati hate those folks, and I simply was assimilated to them despite repeatedly condemning anti-trans policies (actually, many gender critical feminists also oppose these policies, but Twitter has no time for nuance).  Add to this that I think adults in their late 20s who speak and act in public can be criticized in public like other adults, even when they're graduate students, and it makes me an irresistible target for Fox-style caricature.

6.  The caricatures and fabrications are sometimes funny, often instantiations of the "game of telephone" (i.e., in the metaphorical sense of the effects of cumulative errors).   Here's just one example:  I sent a Facebook friend request to a young philosopher I had interacted with professionally, then noticed that his spouse had commented approvingly on Mark Schroeder's lying about me on Facebook; so I wrote to the young philosopher and said he should feel free to decline the FB request, since I didn't want to be a source of domestic strife.  I thought that was a considerate gesture, but not in Twitter land!   In Schroeder's hands, this became transmorgified into Leiter "wrote to the spouse of someone who liked my Facebook post...to pressure him to pressure her to remove her like"!  Sinister BL!

 

7.  Sometimes the caricatures and fabrications on social media are not so funny.   On another occasion, a grad student actually accused me on Twitter of being a "sexist" based on total fabrications about one of my Twitter threads; I tweeted a brief response, calling out this jackass for his lies (I did not blog about this, which would have put his name before thousands and thousands of people in the profession).  This was transmorgified by the pathetic Matt Weiner at Vermont into "a graduate student in philosophy with a pseudonymous account lightly mocked Leiter on philosophy. In response, Leiter posted his full name and insulted him."   No mention of what this adult in his early 30s actually did, of course.  

 

8.  Weiner's source appeared to have been the student's advisor--whom I will call Professor X, since I don't want to subject this student to further publicity beyond that X brought upon him initially--who then spent weeks retweeting every insult directed at me X could find (including Weiner's) to X's large Twitter following (five or six times bigger than my modest Twitter following at that time).  Not knowing X, I did not understand their extreme overreaction so asked on my then-locked Twitter account for "anyone who has met Professor X" to send me a "direct message."  Someone at X's institution described X as “insane," which was no doubt hyperbole.   I deleted my tweets shortly after posting them, since I realized I was now overreacting to the "bullying" by X.*  But the Twitter sleuths had already added now deleted tweets on a locked account to their indictment.  My desire to understand why X was attacking me for weeks on end was transmorgified (e.g., by Lewis Powell [Buffalo]_ into seeking "dirt" on X (even after learning the context, Powell kept repating the smear).  None of them acknowledged any of the context, or ever bothered to ask me.   As with Fox News, facts don't matter, only fitting everything into the predetermined partisan narrative counts.

 

9.   Recently, I criticized a take on the meaning of "bullying," without naming the person who had shared it with me.   Chris "I make things up" Bertram then accused me on Twitter of hypocrisy since I had also "given publicity to a petition deploring 'public singling out and vilification.'"  That petition was protesting the use of "open letters" condemning philosophers for their views as an appropriate way to conduct our collective intellectual life.  That this has literally nothing to do with my critical discussion of an unnamed person's view of bullying did not give Bertram a moment's pause.

 

10.   Another funny and recurrent Twitter fantasy (maybe even rising to the level of a "meme"?) is that I am engaged in litigation or threats of litigation on a continual basis. On Twitter, I've come across people I've never heard of claiming I threatened to sue them, or, in one instance, that I threatened to sue their roommate!  Longtime readers will actually remember that, in the last decade, I retained legal counsel to proceed against smarmy Jonathan Ichikawa and his wife Carrie Jenkins, after which they effectively admitted their malfeasance to the world.  I have indeed retained legal counsel to deal with a handful of other cases of defamation over the last twenty years, but no one in the Twitter bubble to date and no philosophers even.  Since defamation is actually unlawful in all civilized jurisdictions (meaningfully so outside the U.S.), I can only assume the paranoid fantasies about the frequency of my legal actions betray the guilty conscience of those who relish defamation without consequences.  

 

11.   There are no doubt other examples, some of which I've noted before, and most of which I've no doubt never come across, happily.   While the political valence of the Twitter Red Guard is different than that of those living in the Fox bubble, the basic Manichean mindset and group polarization effects are the same.  And like their Fox counterparts, the woke Twitterati remind one of Nietzsche's "last men" from the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

Kein Hirt und Eine Heerde! Jeder will das Gleiche, Jeder ist gleich: wer anders fühlt, geht freiwillig in’s Irrenhaus.

„Ehemals war alle Welt irre“—sagen die Feinsten und blinzeln.

Man ist klug und weiss Alles, was geschehn ist: so hat man kein Ende zu spotten.

That last line should be inscribed on every Twitter account in existence.  (Translation:  "No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everyone is the same:  whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into a madhouse.  'Formerly, all the world was mad' say the most refined [among the last men], and they blink.  One is clever and knows everything that has happened:  so there is no end of mockery.")

 

*I don't really think I was "bullied," but in the inflated sense in which the term is now used, I obviously was.