"Google isn't grad school" and Twitter political analysis
No, this isn't about Elon. It's about all of us.
Before I dive into the post, I want you all to know I’m thinking about doing a weekly newsletter on the political polling world. What would be useful? What are you not seeing elsewhere that you want? Other thoughts on that? Leave them in the comments! Now for the post…
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with Twitter. Kind of love-hate. It’s mostly been a professional operation for me over the last dozen or so years, and I’ve “met” a lot of people on there in my field who are great; I’ve had collaborations and opportunities come up that wouldn’t otherwise have happened.
At the same time, the worst experiences I’ve ever had in life, much less online, have happened on Twitter. If you’re a woman trying to have a public voice and on social media, you are a target for a lot of ugliness. The first time I got a direct death threat, back in early 2016, I just sat in a chair and stared at the floor for a couple of hours. In late 2016, I was harassed and threatened to the point that I had conversations with various law enforcement and legal entities (to no avail - my employer and everyone else basically just shrugged). A few years after that, I got swarmed by activists who thought I had written an article that was problematic, and the PTSD from 2016 led to a panic attack. I’ve been fine since then, but it’s hard to argue that this form of social media is good for mental health.
All this time I’ve never deleted my account, although I have taken breaks from it. But a few days ago, I temporarily deleted my account. What sent me over the edge? The volume of ridiculous political analysis from people who have amassed followings on the site - followings far, far larger than mine - that is about as informed as a google search.
Let me dig a little deeper here. Some of this is about my own ego. Some of it is about the rewards system of Twitter. I have been doing survey research and political analysis for 17 years. I have a PhD. I’ve been through several political cycles now. Young people don’t like to hear this (I didn’t when I was young!), but having longer-term perspective on politics matters. That doesn’t mean young people don’t have great insights - they do! But the social media cycle tends to reward the new young guy (it’s almost always a man) who says what people want to hear, or who has a few good insights but no long-term record, rather than the person with longer-term perspective who is being cautious or noncommittal. Once the golden boy has amassed a following, it becomes a self-feeding cycle as sycophants glom on, liking, retweeting, and often viciously defending everything that person says.
In that light, I found Arthur C. Brooks’s latest column really satisfying. As soon as I saw the title, “Google Isn’t Grad School,” I knew I would love it, because most of the time I feel like I’m competing for attention with hot takes based on a Google search, if anything. The one part that Brooks doesn’t mention is that the phenomenon of experts not being taken seriously is much, much worse for women and people of color. The attacks and harassment are worse, too. Also, you rarely have to preach to us about humility (which is a great point that Brooks makes - experts should be humble, too), because we have always been trained to think we’re “less than” by society.
All of this comes together to make me rethink how I engage with Twitter (or whatever replaces it). After all, I’ve been at this for a long time and don’t have much to show for it, compared to audiences that others in my field have. Among those thoughts:
Twitter inherently cheapens political analysis by reducing it to a few hundred characters. Politics is incredibly complex and defies such reductionism, which means there will always be someone there to “whatabout” anything you say. Perhaps that means that if a point is worth making, it deserves to be fleshed out in longer form and not just tossed out to the world in 280 characters. That’s going to be my plan moving forward: to refine my own points before posting (probably using this site) and to not engage with others who just throw out unsupported hot takes. The “whatabouts” will still be on Twitter, but I won’t engage.
There’s an echo chamber problem on Twitter - and I’ve thought this for a long time - where analysts and reporters get their ideas and stories from conversations with other people on Twitter. The issue with that becomes how small the bubbles are that people operate within. I see a lot of clubby, cliquish behavior, and sometimes the result of that is articles and analysis that don’t explore the full range of political experiences. I think conservatives have a point about coastal liberal media bias — it’s bad enough we’re all mostly located in New York and DC, but then in the one place where we could easily be exposed to other ideas and viewpoints, interaction remains limited to those in similar bubbles. I’m not sure any of us benefit from spending more time in that environment.
Social media will never be the great playing field leveler it is made out to be. Sure, everyone can say what they want. In theory, everyone’s voice has an equal chance to be heard. Except that it doesn’t. Social and professional hierarchies inherently form - regardless of who is in charge of the site - and the same people who have advantages in society will be advantaged on social media. As a white woman, I know I haven’t seen anywhere near the problems this causes, but I’ve seen enough: Women rarely get anywhere in the media political analysis field.
All of this is to say that I’m reducing my Twitter presence to posting things I’ve written. If you want to engage with me and get a response, Twitter is not the place to do that. Ideas deserve to be written out and fleshed out, and people deserve to be fully heard. And most importantly, my sanity needs to be protected from all the stupid political analysis that is out there that gets tons of attention because of who said it or it matched what their audience wanted to hear.
If you read this and you’re like “why on earth do I care?” well… that’s totally fair, and thanks for reading anyway! This post is just to get a few things off my chest about what’s driving the political narratives you see online. There are lots of smart, talented people that I respect interacting with each other on Twitter. But overall, the utility of Twitter has been way, way overblown for a very long time. I can’t fix the white-male bias of politics media, but I can opt out of playing Twitter’s game.
I understand, completely, where you're c9mng from. I'm intrigued by where you're going. In any event, I'm here for it!
I happen to live, work, and do politics in a state where polling, even bad polling is rare. Good polling is rarer still. However, I learned statistics from Morris Hamburg. And while I regularly use and understand statistics, I understand their limitations.
You do you! I'll hang on as best I can.