Welcome to the Resistance

One thing I've been thinking a bit about is "context collapse" or whatever you want to call it. Here's a pretty straightforward example. [At this point I originally embedded only Loesch's tweet, but it is much clearer if I just embed all three in order.]

Iran's supreme leader trolls Trump with photo of himself reading "Fire and Fury" days after Trump ends nuclear deal https://t.co/xWnfSobdsd pic.twitter.com/v7T1brzcu0

— The Hill (@thehill) May 11, 2018

That tweet is quoted in this one:

Welcome to the Resistance, Ayatollah Khamenei https://t.co/t4qljon2Rp

— Nathan McDermott (@natemcdermott) May 11, 2018

Which in turn is quoted in this one:

🤦🏻‍♀️ https://t.co/wnAWnUuLgR

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) May 11, 2018

Of course, "Welcome to the resistance!" is a common joke on Twitter and it would be recognized as such by a pretty wide audience. In particular it refers to cases where someone ridiculous (usually someone conservative) criticizes Trump and is thus sarcastically welcomed into the resistance.

But to anyone unfamiliar with the joke, it would look as though Nathan McDermott was expressing a reprehensible sentiment. And of course this is the point. His tweet will circulate endlessly on right-wing social media, serving its propaganda purpose.

This happens on both sides, of course. In fact it is probably usually unintentional. But it means that you really can't take most tweets at face value. There are obvious exceptions, but in general you have to do work to understand what someone is saying in context.

And you also have to do the work of figuring out who is speaking and where he or she stands in the relevant group (e.g. conservatives). Or in the case of a factual claim, you have to track the claim back to its source or assess the credibility of the person asserting it.

In short, the cumulative amount of work it takes to tweet responsibly, or to understand tweets responsibly, is quite high. And of course the strong temptation (which I'm sure I've given in to many times) is to skip the work and simply assume the claim is being presented in good faith and with ample supporting evidence. But this is part of what has made online discourse so toxic, and it's a major reason that we would all probably be better off spending much less time on Twitter.