Whatever you tweet may be used against you
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Tweets feel like conversation but are judged like writing
![5/4/21, 1:40 AM
Page 2 of 4
https://amp.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/03/27/whatever-you-tweet-may-be-used-against-you
But a newsroom rebellion ended her tenure before it began. A group of
employees wrote a letter protesting against her appointment because of
several tweets she had written ten years earlier, when she was herself a
teen. In them Ms McCammond reported Googling how to avoid waking up
with “swollen, Asian eyes”
. She complained about the lack of an
explanation for a poor mark in chemistry: “thanks a lot stupid Asian T.A.
[teaching assistant]”
. She had apologised for these comments in the past,
but a killing in Georgia on March 16th, in which six of the eight victims
were Asian women, made them look even worse. Two days later Ms
McCammond took to Twitter again—to say that she had agreed to
renounce the Teen Vogue job.
Hers is hardly the first career to be capsized by old tweets. Neera Tanden
was supposed to become Joe Biden’s head of the Office of Management
and Budget. But as boss of a centre-left think-tank she had written tweets
calling Republican senators “the worst”
, a “fraud”
, “Voldemort” and
suchlike. She too was denied her new position. James Gunn, director of
the “Guardians of the Galaxy” superhero films, was fired (then rehired) for
tasteless jokes he had made—also a decade and more ago—about
paedophilia and the 9/11 attacks. This is to say nothing of the less
prominent folk shamed in their communities for offensive tweets.
Why do tweets keep undoing people? The answer may lie in their hybrid
nature. In form, the language of social media is written—but in style, it is
far more like speech. Twitter’s character limit encourages short bursts
that resemble talking, and are then threaded together in quasi-
conversations. People write them as they speak, using sentence
fragments, slang, non-standard spellings (to reflect pronunciation) and so
on. Dialectologists use Twitter to study shifts in vocabulary, grammar and
usage; research shows that the language of tweets closely mimics oral
chatter. Finally, Twitter rewards the same qualities that are prized in
speech: spontaneity, personality and wit.](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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Whatever you tweet may be used against you
- 1. 5/4/21, 1:40 AM Page 1 of 4 https://amp.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/03/27/whatever-you-tweet-may-be-used-against-you Johnson Whatever you tweet may be used against you Tweets feel like conversation but are judged like writing Mar 27th 2021 THINGS WERE looking rosy for Alexi McCammond. Black, female and 27, she was named editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue after a successful stint as a political correspondent for Axios, a Washington-insider news outfit. Teen Vogue had become an unlikely voice of resistance in the Donald Trump era, combining makeup tips with arguments for universal child care. Ms McCammond was to lead the magazine into the Biden years. Listen to this story Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. -00:00
- 2. 5/4/21, 1:40 AM Page 2 of 4 https://amp.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/03/27/whatever-you-tweet-may-be-used-against-you But a newsroom rebellion ended her tenure before it began. A group of employees wrote a letter protesting against her appointment because of several tweets she had written ten years earlier, when she was herself a teen. In them Ms McCammond reported Googling how to avoid waking up with “swollen, Asian eyes” . She complained about the lack of an explanation for a poor mark in chemistry: “thanks a lot stupid Asian T.A. [teaching assistant]” . She had apologised for these comments in the past, but a killing in Georgia on March 16th, in which six of the eight victims were Asian women, made them look even worse. Two days later Ms McCammond took to Twitter again—to say that she had agreed to renounce the Teen Vogue job. Hers is hardly the first career to be capsized by old tweets. Neera Tanden was supposed to become Joe Biden’s head of the Office of Management and Budget. But as boss of a centre-left think-tank she had written tweets calling Republican senators “the worst” , a “fraud” , “Voldemort” and suchlike. She too was denied her new position. James Gunn, director of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” superhero films, was fired (then rehired) for tasteless jokes he had made—also a decade and more ago—about paedophilia and the 9/11 attacks. This is to say nothing of the less prominent folk shamed in their communities for offensive tweets. Why do tweets keep undoing people? The answer may lie in their hybrid nature. In form, the language of social media is written—but in style, it is far more like speech. Twitter’s character limit encourages short bursts that resemble talking, and are then threaded together in quasi- conversations. People write them as they speak, using sentence fragments, slang, non-standard spellings (to reflect pronunciation) and so on. Dialectologists use Twitter to study shifts in vocabulary, grammar and usage; research shows that the language of tweets closely mimics oral chatter. Finally, Twitter rewards the same qualities that are prized in speech: spontaneity, personality and wit.
- 3. 5/4/21, 1:40 AM Page 3 of 4 https://amp.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/03/27/whatever-you-tweet-may-be-used-against-you In aiming for these, people often miss the mark, one reason the platform hosts so much recklessness, attention-seeking and off-target humour. Yet though tweets may be appraised like speech, they are punished like writing. Posts may seem to disappear in an endlessly flowing river, but unless they are deleted they live on indefinitely. A public figure’s stupid tweets are more likely than most to be screen-captured by others, so that even deletion won’t help (and may suggest a guilty conscience). In the days after Ms McCammond’s contrite withdrawal, several of her critics at Teen Vogue made their Twitter accounts private. One turned out to have used a racial epithet to jovially address a (white) friend in 2009. How will society adjust to this new speech-text hybrid? One theory is that only the most conformist or risk-averse will succeed in a sort of woke dystopia; the rest will be vulnerable to the discovery of an embarrassing tweet in an ever-growing back catalogue. A second possible outcome is safety in numbers. So many people (including path-breaking members of minority groups) will be deemed to have transgressed that skeletons in closets come to be regarded as inevitable. In this scenario, society accepts that more or less everyone has said regrettable things, and that, at least in some cases, tweeting them was merely a dangerous category mistake. Alas, that consensus seems a long way off. Hence the third possibility: that people will learn to keep their risky jokes offline, understanding that even if they feel like colloquial remarks, offensive comments written in black and white can be recalled and judged that way. This would make Twitter a lot duller. Spontaneity is its appeal. But the more careers that are derailed, the more parents will urge children to mind their language online, just as they have long warned them to be careful with strangers. Human speech has been around for at least tens of thousands of years, writing for about five millennia. Twitter had its 15th birthday on March 21st. It may be wisest to err on the side of boring until norms settle down.
- 4. 5/4/21, 1:40 AM Page 4 of 4 https://amp.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/03/27/whatever-you-tweet-may-be-used-against-you This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "The memory hole"