What Quigley was talking about (with support from several other “blue check” Twitter users) was one of the more horrific episodes of mass harassment in Twitter history: the December 2013 mobbing of Justine Sacco for a tweet, sent just before an 11-hour flight from London to Cape Town, that read, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Sacco, the 30-year-old director of corporate communications at IAC media company, was mocking a clueless “white privilege” mentality; but when her tweet, sent to her handful of followers, went viral, people assumed she was being literal instead of satirical. Outrage mounted, spurred by the fact that IAC had issued a statement that Sacco was in flight and unavailable, and people gleefully anticipated the look on her face when she landed and checked her email and social media accounts. By the time she did land, she was not only unemployed but so infamous some hotels canceled her bookings and her own relatives shunned her. Yet, when an effort was finally made to set the record straight (partly thanks to Jon Ronson’s coverage of Sacco’s story in his 2015 book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed), a progressive academic, Patrick Blanchfield, saw fit to pen a Washington Post column griping that Sacco was an undeserving “poster child” for online abuse because 1) her ironic tweet could still have caused “hurt” and somehow compounded or trivialized the tragedy of AIDS in Africa; 2) she was an affluent white woman and was “actually doing just fine” (meaning that she had a job again after more than a year of being unemployed, in hiding and sometimes suicidal) and (3) people with progressive credentials, including affluent white feminists who often endured mean words online, were far more deserving.
If you don’t think Sacco’s mobbing was an awful episode of Twitter harassment, chances are, your definition of “harassment” is narrowly political. If you think it was a great moment on Twitter, then you’re actually not against online harassment at all. And one can find plenty of other examples of online harassment masquerading as social justice activism. Consider, for instance, the years-long smear campaign targeting journalist Jesse Singal with vicious slanders and threats—many of them coming not from anonymous trolls but from blue-check progressive journalists. This hounding is pure political vendetta: Singal has questioned some aspects of progressive conventional wisdom on transgender issues.
Or consider people targeted as bigots, sometimes wrongly, on the basis of a viral video. In October 2018, for instance, a Portland, Oregon woman was blasted in the social media—and in a Portland Mercury article—under the derisive nickname “Crosswalk Cathy” for supposedly calling the cops on a black couple over a bad parking job. In fact, as the Mercury eventually admitted, the woman seen in a 30-second video clip was not calling the police but a city parking hotline to report that a car was partly blocking a crosswalk while its owners were picking up takeout food nearby (and had no way of knowing the owners’ racial identity until they returned and confronted her). After the video went viral, at least one activist explicitly invoked the power of Twitter as a punitive instrument: “Twitter, do your thing and identify this woman.” Others tweeted out identifying information, urged people to contact the school where the woman worked in data management, and bragged about writing to demand her firing. While Crosswalk Cathy apparently did not lose her job, she scrubbed her entire online presence for at least a year. Should plans to fight online abuse include proposals for curbing such incidents?
“Disinformation”—as shown by the recent controversies about the proposed “Disinformation Governance Board” of the Department of Homeland Security, raises similar loaded definitional questions. Do we only put the “disinformation” sticker on Donald Trump’s “stolen election” lie, or should it be affixed to, at the very least, a “misleading” or “partly false” label to the parallel claims of Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams? Should Twitter’s disinformation crackdown have snagged the many viral tweets in March 2021 claiming, based on a blatantly out-of-context quote, that a Georgia police official at a press conference casually excused Robert Allan Long’s fatal shootings of eight people (six of them women of Asian background) at several Atlanta spas and massage parlors as “yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did”? (In reality, the official, Capt. Jay Baker, was merely answering a question about what the suspect told interrogators.) Would it apply to a viral tweet earlier this month which distorted a footnote from Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade to claim that Alito and Justice Amy Coney Barrett were arguing that abortion should be banned because the United States needs a “domestic supply of infants” for adoption?
The same complications extend to “hate speech.” Does the definition apply to invective against whites or males? Do “gender-critical feminists” have a point when they argue that Twitter’s policy against “misgendering” (which can apply not only to targeted abuse of transgender individuals but to general statements of opinion about sex, gender, and identity) puts a heavy thumb on the scale of one side in an ongoing and still-unresolved controversy?
Given that Twitter is a mammoth site with somewhat opaque rules and policies and haphazard enforcement—based not only on user complaints but on decisions by individual staffers—drawing any kind of conclusions about patterns of bias is enormously difficult. Again, the point isn’t “Twitter is biased against conservatives” or “Twitter is biased in favor of progressives.” It’s more that the people who think Musk will unleash the forces of darkness on Twitter really do tend to have a huge blind spot when it comes to the toxicity that is already there, including toxicity among progressives, and they want the social media to be managed in a “no enemies to the left” frame of mind.
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Assuming Musk does acquire Twitter after all, it is far from certain that he will make things better. But despite his nods to the “countercultural” right, he really does not seem to have a right-wing agenda; he’s no deep political thinker, but he’s flexible enough to offer some possibilities beyond kneejerk polarization. (Is the proposed unbanning of Trump a sign of where things are going? Not necessarily—and some say the move won’t benefit Trump.) Musk certainly seems willing to talk across political lines, even if his ego is likely to get in the way. Preemptively making him the enemy is not a smart move.
If nothing else, a Musk buyout or even just the prospect of one might shake the place up and drive us to reexamine all sorts of questions—including the political and ideological framing of such concepts as “harassment,” “disinformation,” and “hate speech” on Twitter. Perhaps the difficult conversations could also tackle the outsized role Twitter has come to play in the media and in politics. Is it a public square? A national consciousness? An imperfect cross-section of unrepresentative opinions? Or just a site where journalists, pundits, and activists like to hang out, and whose importance they are prone to inflating?
We’re having that conversation now, which is not a bad start.