by Pete Mazzaccaro
When it comes to social media, I’m not a prolific producer, but I have to admit that I can be a pretty profligate consumer.
Twitter is my medium of choice. I follow a lot of news sources, but also plenty that are ridiculous entertainment. Many of the handles I follow are “cross platform,” originating on Instagram or TikTok, but they’re still plenty entertaining on Twitter. Much of it has been a fun distraction during this year of pandemical home confinement.
There’s the mundane like where cat shouldn’t be (@catshouldnt), a stream of pictures and videos of cats in, you guessed it, places they should not be. There’s the satirical like the videos by comedian Brent Terhune (@brentterhune) and Walter Owen’s Grandpa (@walterowensgrpa) in which Walter Owens (presumably) pretends to be an old man confused and consumed by Fox News and other conservative personalities. A recent favorite has been The Best of Nextdoor(@bestofnextdoor), a hilarious collection of equally amusing and horrifying Nextdoor posts and replies (which recently spawned the amazing song spoofs based on those Nextdoor exchanges by Lubalin @lubalin_vibe_co, which last week made it to “Tonight with Jimmy Fallon.”)
Twitter offers an amazing wormhole of time-sucking links and gags that can consume a whole morning if you’re not careful. (Be particularly wary of Best of Nextdoor, which is a treasure trove of the absurd in which one could get lost for days.)
This month has been a particularly interesting time for Twitter after it remarkably issued a lifetime ban to former President Donald Trump, depriving him of his favorite vehicle to boast of his record, browbeat his opponents and incite his supporters. The New York Times last week created an archive of the insults issued by Trump on Twitter between 2015 and 2021. It’s 48,000 words long. For perspective, that’s 2,000 shy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
The deplatforming of Trump on Jan. 8 has been a huge help to life here in America for the rest of us. A study cited by The Washington Post found that the spread of misinformation dropped by 73 percent (One of Trump’s favorite Twitter behaviors was to retweet – share with his followers – particularly false and misleading Tweets without comment, allowing him to plead ignorance when questioned on the contents of the original post). It didn’t hurt that Twitter quickly followed its Trump ban with the ejection of some 70,000 other accounts tied to the bonkers disciples of QAnon, the nuttiness of which I don’t have adequate space in a single issue of the Local to explain.
I can’t help but wonder if the Twitter ban has maybe been helpful to the mental stability of Trump, too. It’s easy enough to get distracted by videos of cats and comedians. I can’t imagine how bad it would be if half the Tweets on the platform were about me.
I think we could all use a good de-platforming. When the digital world is so overwhelming, an excursion to a world that is solely analog sounds good, even if only for a little while.
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January 28, 2021 at 10:10PM
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Time to deplatform - Chestnut Hill Local
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