In UnHerd, Douglas Murray remembers what it was like before Twitter ruined everything:
Fifteen years ago today, an innovation was unveiled that has probably changed our lives as much as any other this century. It was on 15 July 2006 that software developer Jack Dorsey and his team launched an online platform where text messages of 140 characters could be shared in a group; six days later Dorsey sent his first tweet, launching a new age of reasoned debate and engagement.
There are some who want to celebrate today — principally Dorsey, along with the small number of other people who have become unimaginably rich off the platform. But for everybody else on the planet, I suspect we should welcome the anniversary with roughly the same enthusiasm that we would the emergence of the Ebola virus. For the further away we have come from Twitter’s birth, the clearer it has become that the platform is a source of unimaginable harm to almost every aspect of society.
In the early days, it didn’t feel like this. Like Facebook, Amazon, Google and the other Big Tech monoliths, it all started out so well. Twitter was actually fun back then. People said whacky things. There were cat videos. There was Follow Friday and friendships were made. As professional and amateur newshounds took to the platform, it became the fastest way to learn about any developing story.
If something was going on, Twitter was there first, certainly ahead of the BBC or any of the other news establishments who had to lumber through the old legal and editorial hurdles, rather than enjoying the lightning-quick response time of social media. Politics is a drug, and the most successful drugs provide an instant hit. But they are also the most dangerous, and the downsides soon started to assert themselves.
Soon many started using the site in a game of competitive grievance, or competitive sanctimony. They took obvious glee in targeting victims who had transgressed some moral code; the obvious righteousness of these online crusaders meant they rarely recognised themselves as the aggressors or bullies.
And soon it became apparent that, while everyone was on the site, everyone also hated it. Those on the ideological Left began to turn against the platform when it became clear that it allowed their opponents on the Right to spread “hate”, a scourge which they defined generously. Just as they used it themselves to spread their message.
This all reached its nadir with Donald Trump, whose presidency is to many people the most concrete result of Twitter. The world watched aghast as Trump was able to say often the craziest of things to millions upon millions of followers, speaking unfiltered and directly — in a way the old news media would never have allowed. When he won the presidency and then thanked Twitter for the helping him to get it, many of these natural Twitter followers lost their faith in the platform. How could they have let it happen? It was their platform, after all, this noisy minority of the American and British electorate. Indeed, if you had read UK Twitter ahead of the 2019 election, you would have been absolute certain of a Jeremy Corbyn landslide. Where were these millions of Tory voters who didn’t like Jeremy?
