The Moral Paradoxes of Twitter

It is true that Twitter is the “public square” of the internet, as its CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly called it, but that is no positive description.

In non-virtue public squares, anything can happen –anyone can say anything to anyone. In the vast majority of cases, there are no restrictions on that in America (but that is mainly because no one is around to impose those restrictions, which do exist formally.)

For that to occur, we would need individuals stationed in all social situations to impose such restrictions –which would be undesirable, as it would infringe upon another constitutional liberty (that of the right to privacy.)

The Constitution protects free speech within strictly defined limits –one cannot incite lawlessness or violence, threaten either/or, and one cannot defame others.

Keep in mind that while proselytizing might be annoying, it is protected by free speech.

New York City has many restaurants with packed tables on the sidewalk. By the Constitution’s limits, one would be breaking the law by going on a spree under such conditions, threatening eaters and drinkers with murder and violence, for instance.

Of course, humans are complex –we do a great deal of such threatening implicitly through conversational implicature, among other psycho-semantic masks (indeed, the wielding of signs in lieu of words, like swastikas amongst literally-masked fascists, is one-way people try to weasel their way around this) — but the case is in point!

And, indeed, it is a case one would have to stretch in order to find a reason against –for no one wants a society of real-life-non-virtual trolls.

So why should we accept such a society virtually, such as the public square of Twitter does?

Moderating Twitter and Hateful Social Media Content

From the perspective of pure logic, the “anyone” in “anyone can say anything to anyone” in the “public square” encompasses civil and non-civil individuals –i.e., individuals who respect those restrictions and individuals who do not are the broad types of individuals who inhabit any real or virtual public square.

Civil disobedience has its place –we cannot forget its necessity in the generation of civil rights by those it hitherto unjustly failed to be bestowed upon.

However, in most of the cases where civil disobedience occurs, the person in question likely needs help of some kind –usually, civil disobedience is enacted by those who are simply a danger to themselves and potentially others.

The state and whomever else can protect the citizens from the uncivil in such cases –though it mostly does a poor job of that in criminalizing or cowering away from such matters.

On the other hand, Twitter has much more power to do this because it is virtual, and growing empirical markers can aid such a process.

Empirical Methods of Detecting Hate Speech on Twitter

Recent research published in PNAS Nexus has shown that the use of moralized language on Twitter is linked to the proliferation of hate speech in the reply section of Tweets.

“Higher frequencies of moral and moral-emotional words in source tweets were linked to more hate speech in the corresponding replies. Notably, the effect sizes of moralized language were pretty pronounced.

The research found that each additional moral word in a tweet was associated with a 10.76 to 16.48% higher likelihood of receiving hate speech in response.

This connection was particularly pronounced for activists who employed moralized language in their tweets, with effect sizes being the largest for this group –who were typically politically progressive and whose ‘haters’ were typically far-right extremists.

And as researchers state, “From a practical perspective, observing and understanding the mechanisms underlying the proliferation of hate speech is the first step toward containing it. While we do not advocate that users should avoid moralized language in their social media posts, our work still provides a plausible explanation for why certain posts/users receive high levels of hate speech.”

The Utility of Moralizing on Twitter

Such an explanation is helpful to researchers –and hopefully, Twitter’s moderators investigating hate speech on the platform and doing well to differentiate it from mere proselytizing — those who moralize on Twitter aren’t likely to be moved away from engaging in their replies with the haters.

Sometimes those who moralize on Twitter see their responses to hate as a battle that could, somehow, be won, while other times, they find it amusing to troll the trolls –in either case, they are engaged in such word-battles online because it is something they must value.

To that extent (and surely among others), moralizing on Twitter is profoundly morbid.

One aspect of this complex psychological landscape is the unconditional sense of morality often employed by activists and their counterparts who engage in hate speech.

This form of morality is characterized by an adherence to moral principles for their own sake, without considering the consequences, broader context, and most importantly, without regard for the fact that it isn’t the only set of moral principles that exist. This often results in superficial moral judgments whose superficiality rests on a nebulous sense of reality against another such sense posed as its antithesis.

Quite often, indeed, this starts to generate counter-attacks from the opposition — sometimes activist-types enter into the replies of hate-speech types with outrageous comments in kind.

Customs of these kinds are often taken for granted and unquestioned, leading to individuals perpetuating moralized language –making hyperbolic and high-flatulent statements under the guise of crystal clear “truth” — without considering the impact of their actions in virtue of their not considering the causes of the beliefs which grounded such customs in the first place.

In the case of Twitter, this leads to further division between activists and those who engage in hate speech, generating a slew of pointlessness euphemistically referred to as “engagement” between moralists and chauvinists –the sort of pointlessness of which, if were to occur in real life, would result at the very least in some bystander calling the police.

So yes, while Twitter is the public square, that is precisely why it has a bad reputation –one that can only be improved by regulating the norms which go on therein, as occurs in real life thanks to the Constitution and a broad recognition that civility is of higher value than its antithesis.