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Hey everyone! This is a short one today because it’s going to point you to writing of mine from elsewhere. I published a piece Friday in The Los Angeles Times (“Op-Ed: Thinking of leaving Twitter? Its experience is hard to replicate”) about what network theory can tell us about Twitter’s utility and why it’s so difficult to just migrate somewhere else without great loss. Yahoo News picked it up as well if you hit a paywall at the Times website.
In the process of editing for publication, things hit the cutting room floor. Most of which I’ve written about this newsletter, so bonus for you! You already got that extra context for this piece.
But there were two example incidents on my mind as I wrote that piece, moments where the strength of weak ties embedded in Twitter’s value was so apparent to me.
First, the Michael Brown shooting and ensuing protests in Ferguson, MO in 2014. I was aware of #BlackTwitter prior to that time, but in the course of that evening, it was a revelation to me the activist potential of that subculture. Too, I realized that I had encountered news of the protests because of retweets from weak ties. I followed the Twitter story for several hours before national media picked up it.
One thing I resolved after that night was that I wanted to hear those voices directly. I made a conscious effort in the next month to find and follow people who were at the heart of the #BlackLivesMatter movement: activists, journalists, writers, thinkers, and community members. It was, to my shame, a huge hole in the digital information delivery system I’d constructed. Changing those inputs changed my whole perception, as it should.
Every ensuing moment, when names became hashtags, became a more direct connection to what was going on. When I speak of information traversing weak ties in the Times piece, that’s what I’m talking about. Those casual relationships can gatekeep new types of information, and the more diverse our information sources the more rounded our view of issues become.
The second one is more personal to me and the work I’ve been spending time with this fall. Most of you in the U.S. know of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church, which is famous for showing up on college campuses and funerals to picket and protest (rather offensively) about the LGBTQ community. What you might not know is the story of Megan Phelps-Roper, the granddaughter of WBC’s founder and the former spokesperson for the church. Phelps-Roper ran their social media publicity efforts, the classic case of putting a youthful face on an incendiary ideology as it enters new communication spaces.
Phelps-Roper quite stunningly left WBC and it happened, as this wonderful New Yorker piece details, because of a weak-tie connection. An online acquaintance who disliked everything she stood for befriended her online and began to have DM conversations with her. They got to know one another as people, and once the caustic rhetoric was stripped away, a weak-tie bridge was formed. As I said in the Times piece, weak ties bridge bonded communities. They act as information bridges and, often, a way to think beyond the insular nature of thick trust communities you’re a part of. Twitter changed Phelps-Roper, who now does the kind of advocacy work she used to rail against.
There’s a good lesson here about taking a chance on someone, but also that social networks can facilitate the kind of chance meetings that change us permanently. The future is not fixed in any sense. We as humans can grow and change, and it’s made possible by the bridges we build to one another. I tried in that op-ed to detail why I think that’s at risk in any migration. It might be safer to leave Twitter. It might even be a sound idea ethically. But migrations leave people behind because networks can’t just map themselves to a new space. If we aren’t making space in new places for diverse voices, or if those voices feel unwelcome in those places, we lose something significant.
It’s why I have yet to leave Twitter.
Jeremy Littau is an associate professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University. Find him on Twitter, Mastodon, or Post.