I love Twitter. Just like the historian Dan Snow, I find the social media site to be an overwhelmingly positive experience, and a great place to make friends and acquaintances and share ideas.
Sure, most of the friends I’ve made are as politically insane as I am, but that’s the inevitable result of any service that allows for social sorting. However, one point with which I would disagree with Mr Snow is the idea that the site is a force for the ‘revolutionary democratisation of discourse’. In fact one of the great attractions of Twitter is how hierarchical it is, with each individual being measured by the size of his or her following, plus of course whether they have elite blue tick status.
Inevitably, also, the politics of Twitter is status-based, with the centre-left and centrists being the cool kids from the school playground, and the various other tribes of Corbynites, Communists, social conservatives, English nationalists, rad feminists, jihadis, counter-jihadis and Alt-Right people being the equivalent of metallers, goths or the angry loners planning a school massacre.
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