Tweets feel like conversation but are judged like writing

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https://amp.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/03/27/whatever-you-tweet-may-be-used-against-you
Johnson Whatever you tweet may
be used against you
Tweets feel like conversation but are judged like
writing
Mar 27th 2021
THINGS WERE looking rosy for Alexi McCammond. Black, female and 27,
she was named editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue after a successful stint as a
political correspondent for Axios, a Washington-insider news outfit. Teen
Vogue had become an unlikely voice of resistance in the Donald Trump
era, combining makeup tips with arguments for universal child care. Ms
McCammond was to lead the magazine into the Biden years.
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But a newsroom rebellion ended her tenure before it began. A group of
employees wrote a letter protesting against her appointment because of
several tweets she had written ten years earlier, when she was herself a
teen. In them Ms McCammond reported Googling how to avoid waking up
with “swollen, Asian eyes”
. She complained about the lack of an
explanation for a poor mark in chemistry: “thanks a lot stupid Asian T.A.
[teaching assistant]”
. She had apologised for these comments in the past,
but a killing in Georgia on March 16th, in which six of the eight victims
were Asian women, made them look even worse. Two days later Ms
McCammond took to Twitter again—to say that she had agreed to
renounce the Teen Vogue job.
Hers is hardly the first career to be capsized by old tweets. Neera Tanden
was supposed to become Joe Biden’s head of the Office of Management
and Budget. But as boss of a centre-left think-tank she had written tweets
calling Republican senators “the worst”
, a “fraud”
, “Voldemort” and
suchlike. She too was denied her new position. James Gunn, director of
the “Guardians of the Galaxy” superhero films, was fired (then rehired) for
tasteless jokes he had made—also a decade and more ago—about
paedophilia and the 9/11 attacks. This is to say nothing of the less
prominent folk shamed in their communities for offensive tweets.
Why do tweets keep undoing people? The answer may lie in their hybrid
nature. In form, the language of social media is written—but in style, it is
far more like speech. Twitter’s character limit encourages short bursts
that resemble talking, and are then threaded together in quasi-
conversations. People write them as they speak, using sentence
fragments, slang, non-standard spellings (to reflect pronunciation) and so
on. Dialectologists use Twitter to study shifts in vocabulary, grammar and
usage; research shows that the language of tweets closely mimics oral
chatter. Finally, Twitter rewards the same qualities that are prized in
speech: spontaneity, personality and wit.

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In aiming for these, people often miss the mark, one reason the platform
hosts so much recklessness, attention-seeking and off-target humour. Yet
though tweets may be appraised like speech, they are punished like
writing. Posts may seem to disappear in an endlessly flowing river, but
unless they are deleted they live on indefinitely. A public figure’s stupid
tweets are more likely than most to be screen-captured by others, so that
even deletion won’t help (and may suggest a guilty conscience). In the
days after Ms McCammond’s contrite withdrawal, several of her critics at
Teen Vogue made their Twitter accounts private. One turned out to have
used a racial epithet to jovially address a (white) friend in 2009.
How will society adjust to this new speech-text hybrid? One theory is that
only the most conformist or risk-averse will succeed in a sort of woke
dystopia; the rest will be vulnerable to the discovery of an embarrassing
tweet in an ever-growing back catalogue. A second possible outcome is
safety in numbers. So many people (including path-breaking members of
minority groups) will be deemed to have transgressed that skeletons in
closets come to be regarded as inevitable. In this scenario, society
accepts that more or less everyone has said regrettable things, and that,
at least in some cases, tweeting them was merely a dangerous category
mistake.
Alas, that consensus seems a long way off. Hence the third possibility:
that people will learn to keep their risky jokes offline, understanding that
even if they feel like colloquial remarks, offensive comments written in
black and white can be recalled and judged that way. This would make
Twitter a lot duller. Spontaneity is its appeal. But the more careers that are
derailed, the more parents will urge children to mind their language online,
just as they have long warned them to be careful with strangers.
Human speech has been around for at least tens of thousands of years,
writing for about five millennia. Twitter had its 15th birthday on March 21st.
It may be wisest to err on the side of boring until norms settle down.

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This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under
the headline "The memory hole"