For those who don't know, I host a live chat on Twitter on Tuesdays, 2-3 p.m. local time (New York time), called #GlyphosateAwareness. All use of that hashtag during the week brings you into the chat, whether you participate in it live or not.
The technology of this live chat is the simplest. I want anything I publish online to be accessible to people using Opera from 1992. I use both an officially obsolete version of Windows Explorer and an "older" version of Chrome for Twitter. (Sometimes I use them at the same time--the picture-free version of Twitter that opens in Explorer is much faster and smoother than the flashier version that opens in Chrome, but retweets and replies work differently.) I use Chrome for the chat. Of course Twitter's live chat system works "better," more like a chat app, for people who use newer browsers. For me, the difference between my chat and ordinary Twitter is that I stay online, watch for new tweets, and respond to them directly during live chat time; I do that only sporadically at other times.
That's already one reason why the Glyphosate Awareness chat isn't livelier. Another reason is that people's glyphosate reactions are very personal and individual, but they tend to be things that people don't actually want to chat about, live, with strangers around the world, unless they happen to be researchers sharing scientific study links. As a result the chat consists primarily of links, mostly but not exclusively to studies published in English or French, with some cross-talk, comparisons, and some discussion of translation issues. People who aren't doing research find a lot to read but they don't necessarily want to chat about it; it's not like one of those political radio shows where each person feeds the others' partisan zeal. And of course it's not at all like those feel-good hashtag pages where people come back daily to look at pretty flower pictures or cheer for champion athletes. Glyphosate Awareness is, by nature, a cold prickle.
So are we "trying to scare people," as one troll claimed? I don't think so. People's emotional reactions are hard to predict or control. Some people may be scared, or enraged. People who really hate their fellow humans might even be exhilarated by learning how much harm glyphosate does to people. My goal is not to leave anyone floundering in a quagmire of any emotional feeling, but to give people information they can use to get more control over the way they feel, physically and also emotionally.
Somewhere Out There someone who's been told that Christians ought to feel cheerful and benevolent all the time is thinking, "What's wrong with me? Why am I having these sudden flashes of anger that's not even giving me the energy to resist or evade any real danger? What unconfessed sin is on my conscience, what demonic spirit is oppressing me," etc. etc. etc. For some people this kind of thinking is deadly serious. For those people it can be lifesaving to know that one of the reactions some people reliably have, every time they're exposed to glyphosate, is a sudden surge of what some people experience as anger, others as anxiety or despair. They do not have to wallow in those emotions. They can choose to fix the facts first, and let the emotional feelings follow.
Obviously a Twitter chat is no substitute for consulting a doctor, but for many people who do consult a doctor, after ruling out the most common causes for stubborn symptoms, it can be useful to consider glyphosate as a factor that's become very common before doctor and patient start worrying about something that's very rare and highly fatal and probably not present in any case. With or without exposure to glyphosate, very few people get non-Hodgkins lymphoma. With or without exposure to glyphosate, a lot of people get chronic fatigue as a symptom of mononucleosis, anemia, or diabetes. After exposure to glyphosate, a lot of people who don't have mononucleosis, anemia, or diabetes show fatigue, malaise, lethargy, sluggishness, even narcolepsy. Once they know this, these people can do something to reduce the amount of productivity they lose to fatigue and malaise. Glyphosate Awareness can and should produce an emotional feeling of resolution and empowerment and relief.
Again, maybe it's due to my early conditioning by the Washington Post, and maybe it's true that people in the rest of the world never learn that a news story about something that's sad but fixable is actually a feel-good news story when it motivates people to fix the problem, but I don't think so. I believe that the emotional effect the Glyphosate Awareness chat has on intelligent adults sounds less like "Ooohhh, woooe" than like "A-ha!" If you guessed that Bayer's corporate shills are not actually concerned about people's emotional moods, so much as about the fact that empowering those people to feel good is as simple as cutting off a stream of income for Bayer, you're absolutely right.
Personally, I have very mixed feelings about all the people who want us to censor or stifle any of our thoughts that "hurt people's feelings." First of all, who are those people, and why are their feelings so much more important than ours? Second, why would they even feel safer if they succeed in stifling the expression of thoughts they don't like, instead of being afraid that the people whose feelings they fear so much might, if denied the chance to talk rationally about their feelings, act them out violently? As a woman I don't like knowing that some men dislike and resent women, but I feel much safer when it's easy to recognize those men and avoid them than I would feel if I'd succeeded in stifling them and found myself married to one of them. But third, most of the time, it seems to me that the crybullies who want us to worry about those mysterious "people's feelings" are actually using hypothetical people's hypothetical feelings for their own immediate profit. Bayer doesn't want people to feel healthy, empowered, and free from any need for name-brand drugs. Bayer wants people to feel happy about popping pills in strings daily--the pill to suppress the painful reaction to chemical pollution, the pill to reduce the side effects from the first pill, the pill to block the primary effects of the second pill, and so ad infinitum.
Bayer would actually benefit from having the ability to suppress any publication of the principles of personal health care, which eliminate any need for most of us ever to swallow a pill. Temperance means no market for Alka-Seltzer. Regularity means a greatly reduced market for aspirin. Emotional intelligence means no market for psychopharmaceuticals. Contemporary pill pushers chased Sylvester Graham from town to town with stones, for telling people that many of them would enjoy the benefits of regularity if they ate whole-grain bread rather than fibre-free pastries. Today's pill pushers would like to stone people who are good models of the benefits of healthy personal choices, too.
So, Bayer bought ad space on Twitter and demanded that Twitter "Do Something" about us horrible people who are "scaring" people away from using glyphosate. Bayer trolls are still circulating those memes about glyphosate being "as safe as salt, less carcinogenic than coffee." Righto. We don't need to censor those memes. We need to find the people who circulate them, surround those people with cameras, and demand that they prove what they say by drinking a litre of "Round-Up." The fun part is that some of those people would live; some wouldn't even have to be rushed to the hospital. Some living things do survive exposure to large amounts of glyphosate; apparently they're the ones that produce defective offspring later. But none of the shills wants to find out exactly how they react to this chemical they want people to think is "safe."
I checked. New Twitter claims to offer all sorts of new fun stuff that Twitter did not originally offer. For the individual user I don't see any of that fun stuff. What I see is, primarily, a clunky format that shoves a bigger, more annoying ad graphic right up under the first tweet on each page. I see a lot of users affirming that nobody but the advertisers likes this. But Twitter is now offering some new benefits for advertisers. That "top view" Twitter now works so hard to show you first, if you don't go to the top of each page and make sure you're seeing tweets in chronological order, buries tweets from your individual friends below masses of sponsored product-friendly drivel spewed out by the advertisers.
Well, there goes Twitter's primary social value--its speeding up individual communications among small groups of private people, about emergencies. There was a time when Twitter had real potential for helping people know, as it might be in a flood situation, which blocks of houses were evacuating, which bridges were out, and which puddles were deep enough to stall a car engine, minute by minute. "Top view" makes that impossible.
Twitter is now indulging advertisers in the delusion that people will continue using social media that are edited to be as bland and product-supportive as commercial television. Give us a break. Twitter might have noticed that a lot of Real Twits do not watch commercial television. On social media that are totally dominated by private, independent people, where advertisers can add their voices to everyone else's on an equal basis but have no power to filter out anti-commercial thoughts, it's possible that people who've cultivated high sales resistance might utter and even listen to honest product-friendly messages. The value of a product-supportive tweet used to be high. The value of a product-supportive tweet on sponsor-censored Twitter is negative.
Twitter could have chosen to take the high road: tell sponsors the Advertising Age is basically over, but they could, on uncensored, unfiltered Twitter, have joined conversations in a polite, respectful way that built a good impression of their brands. This is, of course, NOT done by anything that looks like a TV commercial. NOT EVER. A big irrelevant picture of a product on Twitter is the equivalent of a loud obnoxious person, probably reeking of some weird chemical odor that you suspect is more likely to be a louse treatment than a new perfume, plopping down beside you and your lunch date at a picnic table and bellowing, "Buy my product! Everybody needs my product!" You'd call the police. If the comments on those Twitter ads are any indication, people who've been happily drinking Coca-Cola for years are ready to call the police on the Coca-Cola Company's social media blighter.
There's a right way to use Twitter to make people aware of a product--by joining conversations in a nice way, or posting useful or pretty or funny content with your brand on it--and a wrong way. Twitter's "promoted tweet" ad campaign is definitely the wrong way.
I see ads on my chat page, and...I know it costs money to maintain Twitter, and Jack Dorsey has as much right to make a profit as anyone else has, but this is so not the way to do it. I've tried replying to advertisers by suggesting that they actually join the discussion of Glyphosate Awareness. I'm not at all anti-business, or even anti-profiteering. I'd like to see insurance companies use our hashtag, free of charge just like human beings, to discuss the hazards of using glyphosate or other sprayed "pesticides" and the extent to which using these products should raise the price of insurance. I personally don't like the insurance racket, but I don't see it going away and I can see it accomplishing some good here.
For advertisers, the choice is between (a) spending more money on the sort of intrusive, annoying advertising that will probably never work as well as it did a hundred years ago, and thereby ruining Twitter; or (b) spending very little money, but a little intelligently focussed time, on the sort of modest, inoffensive advertising that may actually help the brand's image, and accepting what Real Twits expect from Twitter.
I've checked this, too, right after Twitter Analytics reported my Twitter "reach" dropping by ninety percent overnight. Some readers remember that, two weeks ago, I advocated that all of us who use Twitter go back through our lists of followers, however many hundreds or thousands of them, and whether or not we have any idea how some of them ever got onto that list, and make direct contact with them--to start planning how, or whether, we'll connect to them in a post-Twitter world. Well, I did that. I've been doing it. I have a few hundred Tweeps left to tag, but I've seen enough to know...Twitter's idea of "Top Tweets" and "Quality Filtering for Notifications" has kept some Tweeps from seeing each other's tweets, it's inflamed the ones who've pounced on SPLC's group flagging and shadowbanning as evidence of political bias, and it's caused quite a few to turn and walk slowly away.
A page of "Top Tweets" that shows just one tweet from a friend, but not necessarily person's most recent one, on top of a big splashy ad graphic eating up half your screen, does not say "Read on; more good stuff below." It says "Just call Tracy to find out what that tweet was about and close this tacky TV-looking window."
Then, suppose you know your friend Tracy does not like live phone calls, so you check your notifications page. Twitter has automatically turned on "quality filtering." That's the sponsors' notion of quality, nothing to do with yours. You can fine-tune this feature if you choose--to edit out individuals who've not disclosed a live phone number to Twitter, individuals who aren't your followers, individuals whom the sponsors have decreed to be less than "relevant, credible, and safe." What about the options for editing out irrelevant ads, annoying videos, big memory-hogging pictures? They're not there. Only individuals can be declared "low quality" and your e-friends, especially if they tweet about topics like independence, frugality, or a True Green lifestyle, have been so declared, and their notifications may be suppressed until you individually exchange tweets with them.
Hah. We "low quality" individuals are Twitter's lifeblood. Sponsors like Bayer, and like Merck (which took the lead in demanding that anyone in favor of respecting people's right to make informed medical choices for themselves be ruled less than "relevant, credible, and safe"), are Twitter's Bacillus tuberculosus.
Private people built Twitter. It exists to connect us to each other. When it stops connecting us to each other and tries to force us back into the position of silent, passive consumer-victims for corporations, Twitter may well cease to exist. And deserve to.
"Oh, Twitter's not censoring you little private peons, just protecting our Corporate Lordships from having to look at your nasty little independent thoughts. You can still tweet to each other. We'll just make sure only your active connections see your messages. Twitter can take our money to give us a complete bully pulpit, because money is what makes things like advertisements for glyphosate 'relevant, credible, and safe,' and broadcast our voices like commercial television, while you can go back to passing notes to each other like fifth-graders."
Nice compromise...um, not.
I'd be interested in your proposed strategies. Mine is, for now:
1. Tweet to, or at least try to tweet to, everyone on your f'list. (Continue, if you've already started.) Make sure they know they need to check, before reading any page on Twitter, that they're reading "Latest tweets" and that their notifications page has "quality filtering" turned OFF.
2. Expect limited response. Most people didn't notice that "quality filtering" was installed to block their receiving your notifications. They just noticed that their "top tweets" page had become boring and figured they'd outgrown Twitter. Some of the followers whose names you don't recognize may have actually left Twitter long ago. Some of them may genuinely be what you consider "low quality" Twits--people whose Twitter accounts are dedicated to a single purpose that you don't want to endorse, like brands for products you don't buy.
3. For people with whom you want to maintain contact, share a link to a page with your e-mail and real-world mailing addresses on it.
4. If you've invested in Twitter's success in any way, start divesting now. Plan a more efficient e-free communication and networking strategy for the post-Twitter world. Social media sites that rule private individuals "low quality" are not going to last long. We can still use Twitter--but we need to use it to begin building networks that will outlast it.
5. Oh, for what it's worth...While Twitter's been not only isolating all of us "low quality" private people as a matter of policy, but putting me specifically in "Twitter Time Out" when Bayer's cyberbullies squealed, my f'list has actually grown. Yours might, too. Let's keep each other's f'lists growing and, if the advertisers don't agree to a revised contract that automatically defines their tweets as "low quality," actively promotes ours as "What You Might Have Missed During Twitter's Moment of Temporary Insanity," and imposes a lifetime ban on any advertiser who's called for censorship, the next thing we do, let's block all the advertisers.
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