Twitsteria, Horrible Herds and Governments in Glasshouses.
Twitsteria, Horrible Herds and Governments in Glasshouses.
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In September 2022, at the Cervejaria Alphaiate bar and restaurant in Brazil, everything seemed normal, until one diner suddenly stood up, looked in the opposite direction, as though regarding an approaching threat, and then fled. Within moments he was followed by all of the terrified diners in the restaurant. Some even left their belongings behind in their haste.
According to witnesses, diners thought a group of people people running towards the restaurant must be escaping danger but, in fact, they were joggers.
Humans, like other animals, will act en masse; they will even stampede to avoid danger. Herd mentality is a well-understood phenomenon, in which individuals conform to the behaviours or beliefs of a larger group, often without independent thought. In our evolutionary past it has proven very useful. You wouldn’t sit idly by, twiddling your thumbs, while the rest of your tribe fled a sabre-toothed tiger.
Groupthink is the brother of herd mentality. It arises when the desire for harmony or conformity in the group leads to irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcomes. Members of the group prioritise consensus over critical evaluation of alternative ideas, often suppressing dissenting viewpoints.
In the past week, X (formerly Twitter) has once again unveiled our pronounced fallibility to herd mentality and groupthink.
You might think I’m talking about the sort of social media herd behaviour whereby people share racist ideas, or incite riots, or even counter protests. I will come to that, but the example of herd mentality which arrested my attention this week was the wave of demands that something must be done about X and something must be done about the man behind it, Elon Musk.
What has Elon Musk done to inspire the wrath of the Liberal Left’s great and good, you might be wondering? Rewind a little and his first serious crime was to buy Twitter in the first place. He famously said that $44 Billion was not the cost of Twitter, it was the cost of restoring free speech. Left-wing and liberal commentators promised they would be leaving Twitter in their droves for some other social media alternative (I literally forget the name) but they didn’t.
Most recently he has weighed in on the self-evident two-tier policing in the UK today and personally tweeted and criticised the Prime Minister. He’s even predicted civil war might follow.
Elon Musk is living rent-free in a lot of liberal and left-wing heads at the moment. Marianna Spring, the BBC’s disinformation and social media correspondent asks ‘What is Elon Musk’s game plan?’ Apparently he won’t reply to requests for an interview, tsk.
The hysterical frothing has been something to behold.
It’s odd, but I don’t recall such fury about the role of social media in the Arab Spring or the BLM riots. Presumably those were the right sort of riots. Nor much anguish when it transpired during the release of the ‘Twitter Files’ that the FBI and US government intelligence actors had colluded to stifle the Hunter Biden laptop story, as well as censored accounts and whole topics which conflicted with various official narratives.
The illiberal elite’s greatest fear seems to be that people voice opinions that they do not like. Dissent must be ridiculed, crushed, censored or jailed. Musk is the biggest boogeyman in the Wild West of free speech.
But it’s a smaller Wild West than you think. Contrary to Edward Luce’s assertion, Twitter is not the largest platform in the democratic world. It doesn’t even make the Top 10. If you think it is very influential it is because you spend a lot of time on it, as many politicians, journalists and other commentators do. Most of the UK demos do not hang out on Twitter. This fact-check is probably of equal embarrassment to both Luce and Musk.
