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Adiós Twitter

In the run-up to an election Twitter will ceaselessly generate fake news and rumours, and enable online "personalities" to circulate accusations and caricatures of their enemy's ideology, flattening details into soundbites and slogans

Mark Nayler

Friday, 16 April 2021, 16:18

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I've pretty much given up on politicians, as I'm sure many of you have. Very few of them - and I'm mainly thinking of Spain and the UK here, but perhaps you'll think this applies elsewhere, too - inspire trust, loyalty or intellectual enthusiasm. They rarely make decisions or announcements that encourage voters to question the status quo, and most of them seem to be motivated by a love of power and status.

This week, however, Barcelona's mayor Ada Colau actually did something surprising and thought-provoking: she took herself off the hate-filled social media platform Twitter. To use the misleadingly jaunty term for posting half-formed thoughts on the site, she will no longer be "Tweeting" to her audience of almost a million followers.

In her departure message on Facebook (maybe that'll go next), Colau said that Twitter normalises "violence, insults [and] sexist verbal attacks" and condemned the practice of creating false accounts with the "sole objective of causing harm". "Politics," she went on, "has too much noise, testosterone and easy Tweet proclamations, and needs more empathy, complexity, listening, pedagogy and nuance."

Of course I'm going to agree with this: I've never had a Twitter account because I dislike the very idea of it, ditto for Facebook. But Colau's reasons for rejecting it, both as a political platform and as a forum for debate and discussion, will hopefully make even the most devoted "Tweeters" examine the nature and purpose of their online activity.

Her criticisms come just ahead of Madrid's regional election on 4 May, in which social media, especially Twitter, will play an instrumental role. That's to say, it will ceaselessly generate fake news and rumours, and enable online "personalities" to circulate accusations and caricatures of their enemy's ideology, flattening details into soundbites and slogans. Put your hands together for Twitter, ladies and gentlemen!

Colau's call for understanding and complexity instead of hatred and simplification applies to politics as a whole, whether conducted from a keyboard or in person. It's just as impossible to formulate a coherent argument in 280 characters (40-50 words) as it is to engage with ideas or policies by hurling insults at the opposition, the practice which has unfortunately replaced reasoned debate in Madrid's Congreso.

Barcelona's thoughtful mayor rightly wants a higher standard to prevail, and she leads by example.

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