Last year was the year when Twitter, now known as X, broke irreparably. In 2023 engagement fell off a cliff, advertisers withdrew and long-term influencers stopped – or greatly reduced – posting. What was a busy global public forum now resembles an aggressive wasteland filled with hate and rumour. On 18 December, the European Commission opened infringement proceedings against X for allegedly breaking EU law on disinformation. It is high time there was a broader discussion about the challenges social media poses to liberal democracy. But to do that, we need to understand why it can be so appealing. The battle for balance and truth may be lost on X, but it continues elsewhere.
I used Twitter very heavily for several years, and know that social media is not necessarily trivial. Long before I started to comment myself, I enjoyed it as a treasure trove of information. By following authors, experts, journalists, lawyers, politicians, officials and institutions around the world whose work was relevant to mine, or about whom I was simply curious, I could curate my own, transnational newspaper. As a researcher, Twitter saved me vast amounts of time, as long as I made sure to triple-check my sources and never rely solely on the information provided on the platform itself. As a writer it forced me to be concise and persuasive. When you have only 140, and later, 280 characters, every syllable counts.
When I started actively tweeting myself in 2017, I had practically no followers. The initial lack of audience was actually a good thing. When you have nobody to impress, you might as well say exactly what you think. You can also experiment. So I wrote about the subjects I concentrated on professionally, UK history and politics, but also about the books I had read for fun, about art or music I love, about places where I had lived or travelled to and films I had watched. I tried to explain the foreign policy of my home country, Germany, and increasingly commented more generally on international affairs and geopolitics.
The response was overwhelming. Five years after starting to post my own thoughts, my follower count reached 40,000. It is entirely possible that half of them were bots, but it still provided me with a surreal, global reach. Twitter was no longer just my public diary, it had turned into the witty office chat I had never had, the glorious dinner party full of wise and fascinating people I longed to attend. There were many like me, and together we watched and debated as the UK parliament tore itself apart over Brexit, as the pandemic stopped the world, as armed Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, British and American troops withdrew hastily from a desperate Afghanistan, and Putin’s Russia started to bomb Ukraine. We were each on our own, we disagreed, fought and sometimes fell out, but bizarrely, it somehow felt as if we were all in it together.
The most rewarding interactions I had online happened when I asked my followers a question, often related to my research of UK history and politics. Do you remember what you were doing on the day the Falklands war started? If you are a member of the armed forces, why did you join up? Which history books did you read in school and at university? Do you feel British, or rather English, Scottish or Welsh? All of these questions elicited hundreds of responses, many of them sent privately by people who weren’t inclined or allowed to put their personal experiences online. These anecdotes introduced me to my readers’ point of view, pointed my research in new directions, and reminded me why I was writing in the first place.
All that attention had a downside. The dark aspects of social media were always there, only a few clicks away. There were men who genuinely scared me. There was a bit of outright abuse, although it never got anywhere as bad as what colleagues of mine from minority backgrounds experienced. I learned to instantly delete a message or email after the first rude or inappropriate word, instead of reading it to the end. What I found more difficult to deal with were the trolls who were smart enough to make me feel horrible about myself without using vocabulary that would have made me instantly block them. On a weekly basis, someone would tell me they were disappointed in me, that I was naive, arrogant, unimaginative, entitled, misguided, badly informed, a fool. I did not react, but yes, they got to me, and I often wondered if they were right.
Nobody is entirely immune to the narcissism that social media encourages. It takes time and research, as well as intellectual and emotional discipline, to introduce nuance and factual information into a conversation. Balanced analysis is hard; snark and outrage take a lot less effort. Everybody enjoys being praised and nobody likes being corrected in public, with the result that there is a real risk that even the most seasoned analysts or journalists start worrying more about their own reputation or “brand” than about the issues they are writing about.
When everyone is more concerned with what they stand for, as opposed to with what they know, meaningful conversation becomes impossible. There is no more analysis, only judgment. Every heavy social-media user turns into a mini-embassy, and a binary worldview sets in, as can now be observed in the online reactions to the war between Israel and Hamas. This trend towards aggressive over-simplification and emotionalisation started long before Elon Musk took over Twitter, although things have become infinitely worse since then.
It is wrong to assume that what people experience on social media is somehow distinct from their “real life” and therefore ultimately unimportant. What happens online changes what you read, how you feel, what you do and who you see. That can be wonderful or deeply unpleasant, even dangerous, depending on the circumstances. In my case, the overall impact of social media on my life was overwhelmingly positive.
As my follower count grew, so did my network of contacts. This benefitted my career as a writer and broadcaster. More importantly, it gave me some completely unexpected insight and experiences that widened my horizons and genuinely enriched my life. Like the time when an officer in the British army and his wife invited me to his regimental dinner. It was a fascinating evening full of traditions that to me seemed slightly bizarre and great fun. Or the extremely educational three-day trip to Latvia I was invited on in reaction to a request for reading tips on the history of the Baltic states.
An Anglican bishop showed me around the House of Lords in Westminster, and took me into the chamber to watch a debate. A diplomat’s wife sent me books for my children. A schoolteacher invited me to speak to her pupils. Over the years, some of the people I met on Twitter turned into genuine friends that I regularly see, speak to, trust and rely on, and whom I would have probably never come across otherwise. These friendships alone made it worthwhile.
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It is because I knew it so well that I can say with absolute certainty that the platform I benefited from so much no longer exists. And even if it did, I no longer have the time or energy to use it in the intense way I once did. But I do understand its power and I know that the larger issue confronting us all is not limited to one powerful man, or his huge, broken platform. Social media can greatly enrich democratic discourse, but it also has the potential to destroy it.
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Helene von Bismarck is a Hamburg-based historian specialising in UK-German relations
