New $20 Million Liberal Magazine Makes Braindead Pro-Twitter Case

While I wouldn’t push back on her assertion that Twitter is clearly a very influential public square, calling it the most influential public square is the classic move of indulging these folks’ debate club kid brains, where they think they are the protagonist who is going to save the world with logic on their favored platform. She cites a Pew poll showing that one in four Americans use Twitter as the basis for her assertion that she simply must stay in the Nazi bar to try to denazify it, so my question to Demsas would be if she considers Facebook, something used by around seven in ten adults per Pew polling, to also be an invaluable public square worth dedicating all her time to. Per Demsas’ logic, she should be spending far more time in the shrimp Jesus forums on Facebook convincing seven out of ten people to rejoin reality than trying to convince one out of four people to not indulge Elon Musk’s Nazi propaganda.

After citing some data to try to back her illogic up, Demsas abandons all logic in favor of a vibe-based self-serving narrative with no evidence to support her assertion that “persuadable people are usually not the die-hards, they’re the lurkers in the big online fights, the ones who might throw out a like or ask a question but rarely participate.” It’s pretty telling that after she tries to make a data-based case in her open for why being on Twitter is important, there isn’t a single hyperlink or datapoint she cites in her section trying to rebut the notion that “By remaining on Twitter we are lending the platform credibility, without which it would not have its power to command influence.” She simply just accepts that Twitter has immense influence and there is apparently nothing we can do to stop it even though she acknowledges that “deplatforming can be extremely effective. Just look at Milo Yiannopoulos.”

This is such a wishy-washy take, the kind of thing where deep down the writer knows that they are making a weak case with a much stronger counter-argument against it, and she keeps returning to the good points people make about leaving Twitter before hemming and hawing a bunch of vibes-based retorts all centered around her being one of the best and most valuable kids in debate club. I do not understand how a person can write these sentences and conclude that it’s good to stay at the Nazi bar: “The amount of cruelty on Twitter is not good for the mind, soul, or body politic. Anyone with more than a few thousand followers is used to receiving a flood of vitriol whenever they share an opinion less anodyne than ‘I love pizza.’ I don’t think it’s great that I’ve desensitized myself to casual savagery. But if you’re going to keep posting on the internet, you can’t let a few N-words get you down.”

I have published many articles that I have disagreed with here at Splinter. As Editor-in-Chief, my primary alliance is to the internal logic a piece lays out, not whether I think they’re right or wrong, and never in a million years would I publish this disorganized nonsense from The Argument’s EIC, even if I agreed with her point that folks need to stay on Twitter. This article just goes to show you how bad the case to stay on Twitter actually is. ‘Sure, deplatforming works as Milo demonstrated, and Twitter is actively destroying my mind, soul, and body and I am desensitized to the N-word, but you should still stay on Twitter so lurkers won’t become Nazis’ is one of the weakest arguments have read in my decade-plus career of writing and editing hot takes on the internet.

Just admit you’re hopelessly addicted to Twitter, man. I was too. It took me a while to leave the Nazi bar but the moment I did and stopped getting a flood of 1488 handles in my mentions telling me to get in the gas chamber, I found my mental health improving. Logging on to Bluesky is its own kind of unique hell given that half the userbase doesn’t know what a joke is, but at least I know when I click on my notifications tab, I’m likely not going to see death threats or porn like it became fairly common on Twitter to see before I left it for good. The folks who decry Bluesky as a progressive echo chamber not worth using but think Twitter is a Nazi echo chamber worth staying on are just revealing how their brains are forever stuck in high school debate club where they’re aching for their ideological opponents’ validation.

On one hand, as a fellow EIC, I do have an appreciation for how difficult editing and writing can be. Some days you’re just not going to have your fastball, and everyone who writes on the internet has written a clunker or several at one point, especially those of us who write multiple articles every day. But this is Demsas’ only article! This big $20 million business launching to great fanfare across the center-left this week had all the time in the world to put their best foot forward, and the best thing their EIC can come up with is ‘sure it’s completely destroyed my brain and desensitized it to all sorts of awful things, but it’s important to debate Nazis so an unknown number of lurkers may not become Nazis one day.’

Again, the logic Demsas puts forward in alleging Twitter to be a vital public sphere applies doubly or triply to the much larger and more widely-used Facebook. Per her own logic, she should be in the comments of all the AI slop on the pedophile chatbot site, doing her debate club shtick to convince everyone that a soldier carrying a baby home from the war on the moon to its grandmother isn’t real. Liberalism’s public intellectuals have failed miserably this century, and this article is a great example of how. They are overgrown debate club kids who don’t know how to function in the real world, fundamentally do not understand how studies show logic is not the best weapon to counteract propaganda, and they see everything in politics through the lens of their glory years in high school standing in front of a podium performing for a group of judges.