@bachophile said in Maybe stop using social media.:
@Horace this is the gist
"Most people don’t utilize the platform or care all that much about it. A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that 77 percent of American adults did not use Twitter. Most of those who do tweet don’t visit the site every day, according to that survey. A Pew study, also from 2021, found that 97 percent of tweets are produced by the top 25 percent of Twitter users, the people who are most active on the platform."
"Twitter also can distort political reality. If you spend a lot of time there, you are most likely seeing other people who tweet a lot, a group that doesn’t represent real life. So you might vastly overestimate the number of people who support, say, packing the Supreme Court and underestimate the number of people who don’t vote at all. "
"And sometimes Twitter lends itself to the unfortunate Extremely Online attitude, which I defined a few years ago as being deeply enmeshed in internet culture and believing that events in that milieu — like trending topics on Twitter and viral Facebook posts — matter in the offline world, too."
I listened to a recent podcast with Ezra Klein, who is this writer’s boss. He thinks Twitter is the most important narrative shaper in America, and he thinks narratives are fundamental to all of politics. I suspect Ms Coaston would eagerly agree with his sentiments, even as she writes columns like this one where she pretends to be above it all, and to keep it all in perspective.
