Twitter Is Digital Cocaine

An ode to an X

I joined Twitter some time in twelfth grade and left during the summer of last year, on the grounds that it was taking up too much time and was not useful. I was uncertain at the time, but in hindsight, I’m really glad I did it. There are lots of things about Twitter that one doesn’t realize when they’re on it, but become obvious once one has turned their back to it.

There are, of course, a wealth of studies finding that Twitter has lots of negative effects. If you spend too much time on Twitter your teeth will fall out and you will die! I haven’t looked into them that carefully, and they might be subject to publication bias, but the claim they make strike me as plausible. This one, for example, says:

Critically, different uses of Twitter are linked to different outcomes: scrolling down the feed and using Twitter to escape one’s problems is related to decreased well-being; information seeking is related to increased outrage; and social uses (such as replying to others) is related to increased sense of belonging. Participants who retweet more often tend to be people who are more polarized. Critically, these effects were meaningful in size, not trivial, comparable to the effect of social interactions on well-being. Though these results indicate that Twitter meaningfully influences how people feel, they also suggest ways people can use it to mitigate some of its negative consequences

Twitter, like cocaine, seems to have an absurd capacity to turn high-functioning people into sad sacks—to turn competent academics into people who waste 4-hours a day getting outraged about random things said by stupid people. The reason for this is relatively straightforward: the Twitter algorithm thrives on engagement. As a result, people mostly see things that they’ll respond to.

But people respond more to outrageous things. As a result, Twitter shoves in our faces the most idiotic, hideous, and repulsive thing anyone on the internet has said, and it does this constantly. The thing that most enrages us and presses our buttons and makes us want to reply is what we’re constantly inundated with.

We all sort of know that people around us believe crazy and stupid things. We occasionally hear that half of the country denies the big bank and think “wow, other people are so crazy.” But we can mostly keep it in the back of our minds and not think about it. No doubt if I got into a lengthy discussion about eating meat with random cashiers at the grocery store, I would find out that they think crazy things and would find that annoying. But I don’t have to know what they think about meat eating.

Twitter, however, makes people optimize for getting engagement, both through saying outrageous things and saying things that their friends want to signal that they agree with. No one wants to signal that they agree with really trivial things—no one Tweets “genocide is just awful—maybe one of my ten least favorite things. It sucks so much. If I could press a button to stop a genocide, I absolutely would.” Instead, people get social credit by signaling to their ingroup that they believe controversial things that their outgroup rejects. And it gets even more engagement if it’s more outrageous to an outgroup.

Twitter also limits what one can say to 250 characters. That’s about 3 sentences, far too little to have room for nuance or complexity. So as a result, Twitter optimizes for people uttering simplistic statements of deeply controversial views that annoy those they disagree with and are praised b those that they do agree with. It then makes all the people they disagree with see their message and have another reminder about the crazy things that the outgroup believes.

That Twitter polarizes people is about the least surprising thing in the world—it’s a bit like the claim that cemeteries have more corpses than average. The incentives of Twitter favor being outrageous and simplistic and finding things other people say to be outraged about. On Twitter, I was constantly inundated with a barrage of idiotic statements about the supposed permissibility of meat-eating and the failures of effective altruism. But the worst part was that I had the opportunity to respond to it!

I couldn’t just let someone get away with posting that veganism is wrong because its food has more ingredients than raw meat, which only has one ingredient, or because vegans eat plants which are alive too you know, or because chickens are mean to each other sometimes, or because animals eat other animals in nature, or any of a hundred other unbelievably idiotic statements. Or debaters claiming that my article, in which I quoted Noam Chomsky and Freddie DeBoer is “alt-right.”

Those who aren’t on Twitter are often surprised by how mean, petty, and vindictive everyone on Twitter seems. But being constantly bombarded by people in your outgroup saying preposterously stupid things, selected specifically for needling people like you is a really good way to get people to lose their cool.

Twitter also is, like cocaine, quite addictive. Because you get a dopamine hit when you see a notification, you’re encouraged to constantly check it. As a result, it makes it hard to focus on other things. Since leaving Twitter, it’s been much easier to focus on things. When I was on it regularly, it was hard to write an essay without checking it at least once—which is a pretty astonishing level of addiction. Even the cocaine addicts can go an hour without snorting cocaine.

It’s also not surprising that Twitter makes people miserable. When one spends a lot of time on Twitter, they’re inundated with a constant stream of messages, never really fully taking in or pondering an idea the way one does when they read a book. They’re pulled in 100 different directions, seeing a hundred different thoughts, many outrageous, many that they agree with, many about things that they just don’t know about. Spending a few hours on Twitter leaves one with a rather facile and hollow sensation—a bit like the feeling one gets when they wake up at 3 pm and realize that they’ve wasted most of the day. This constant feeling of apathetic dejection, which generally accompanies time spent on social media, is a recipe for misery. No one ever is happy to have spent the last 5-hours on Twitter. In that respect, it’s even worse than cocaine—at least cocaine offers a genuine temporary high.

Twitter is popular because scrolling is the lowest-effort thing in the universe. As long as you can read, scrolling through the phantasmagoria is quite simple. It just involves reading an endless barrage of things people have said and getting a quick dopamine hit whenever someone likes something that you’ve said.

But this is one of the things that makes it so sinister. The things you can do on a subway without exerting any mental effort aren’t the things that make you happy. The things that make people happy are those that require striving and achieving, or time spent with people. We are a social species, yet Twitter offers an upside-down and warped version of personal interaction, like something out of a black mirror episode, where all interactions are hollow and gamified.

All this is to say that if you’re on Twitter, you should probably stop being on Twitter. You’ll no doubt have a bunch of reasons why that would be unacceptable—how else could you maintain all your important relationships with people like Bob4219 and ScootBoy (parody). Well, if you’ve genuinely made good friends on Twitter you could, you know, ask for their phone numbers or emails and chat with them that way.

Leaving Twitter may have costs. Perhaps this would threaten your relationship with ScootBoy (parody). But there’s a massive benefit. If you’re a regular Twitter user, it would free up huge amounts of time. To take one random example of a very regular Twitter user, consider Richard Hanania, who has made about 45,000 Tweets. Assume these Tweets average 20 words each. This means Hanania Tweeted about a million words—enough to write around 9 fairly lengthy novels.

Now, is it likely that you’ll become Brandon Sanderson and write a bunch of long books if you leave Twitter? No. But whatever you’ll be doing instead will almost surely be better. And you’ll be happier, less angry, and less polarized! Most importantly, it’ll free up enough time to read all my old articles!