There is a predictable and dulling rhythm to the routine trashing of reputations on Twitter: the high-profile journalist, writer, editor, or public figure transgresses the peculiar lore of a Twitter tribe – says the wrong thing, does the wrong thing, publishes the wrong thing – and is torn down and shamed. It feels deeply personal, and the insults often are, but it’s also part of a broader movement, what is commonly referred to as being ‘cancelled’. For many, the fallout is devastating – some lose their livelihoods, their careers, and their reputations. Many targeted journalists will announce their intention to ‘take some time off Twitter’, as if the site is a dreary but necessary second job they cannot quit and instead must merely seek to curb its influence. The host of television’s Q+A, Hamish Macdonald, has suspended his account temporarily. According to The Guardian’s ‘The Weekly Beast’ column, he intends to use the surplus time to ‘read a book a week’, which could be perceived as commentary on the paucity of deep reading that is possible with an active Twitter presence. Baxendale also took a short break from Twitter in the aftermath of the abuse, but has since reactivated her account to track breaking news. ‘The most destructive aspect of Twitter is that people will say things to you [on the site] that they would never say over a cup of tea in real life,’ she says. ‘It attracts people with very strong, often angry, opinions.’

So why do so many people bother with Twitter? If the platform is so destructive, so hellish, why are so many writers, activists, generalist journalists, and public figures still on it? The answer is, of course, buried in the question: it’s the virtual village square where news breaks, gossip is circulated, and the very public online executions – apologies, cancellations – occur. It is an explosive forum for opinions and grandstanding, and while some accounts focus on light-hearted GIFs and memes, the dominant content is highly partisan.

As a result, Twitter has devolved into a channel for our most juvenile emotions: boosting allies, performing for an audience, complaining at no one and everyone at the same time, tearing down opponents, crafting a ‘likeable’ online persona. This tendency has only intensified in recent months, with the global pandemic shrinking many people’s worlds into a smaller set of habits and routines, while Twitter has expanded to fill in the gaps that would otherwise be devoted to real-world engagement with others. In its April report to shareholders, Twitter admitted that, partly as a result of the pandemic, usage jumped to 166 million daily global users in the first quarter of 2020 – up from 152 million at the end of 2019 – highlighting the need among some users to find comfort in a cause or a tribe, to let out lockdown frustrations, to distract ourselves. As a difficult 2020 draws to a close, should we really be surprised by how toxic the site has become?

Our modern tendency to express our feelings publicly, to as many people as possible, is twinned rather disastrously with a concomitant desire to shut out ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ ideas. In the Twitter world, we no longer need to countenance opposing ideas or arguments – a novel thought – but can instead assert a so-called right to be protected from exposure to what is disagreeable, to cancel what is discomfiting. Our social-media age promotes psychic dependency, an impoverished version of adulthood in which the locus of control is externally rather than internally oriented. Among those with this passive psychological make-up, the world perpetually happens to them: they are acted upon, they are victims of pernicious and relentless external forces, they require cosseting from the difficult world. Some people are, of course, genuine victims of tragedy or circumstance, who face damaging and systemic challenges and injustice – and that is not to be dismissed. But there is a troubling narrative at work in the cancel culture playbook as the self-diagnosed masochist/victim – wary of others, tremulous as a kitten – shifts to the polar and equally dysfunctional psychological position of sadist, the destroyer of reputations, the bully with the pitchfork and a ready mob on backup. In most religions, you are afforded redemption, but Twitter warriors are not interested in reconciliation, or the kind of nuance or context that would flesh out the issue and complicate their activism. Very often the victim of the cancellation will appeal for mercy, offering an apology and umpteen hours of community service in the form of personal reflection. It matters little. The attempted apology, the pleading for mercy, does not inspire grace but the rush to double down on the injury – sans courtroom, or anything resembling a fair hearing. Twitter is a blunt, crude, and highly effective tool to bring about the annihilation of another human being.

Often that human being is a woman. Not exclusively, of course, but women statistically receive a disproportionate amount of hate and trolling online, and there is a certain odious underground of the Twitter universe that reserves its ugliest expression for women with both power and profile. In their 2018 ‘Troll Patrol’ study, Amnesty International found that female journalists and female politicians were subjected to some kind of harassment or abuse on Twitter roughly every thirty seconds, and women of colour experienced significantly higher levels of abuse overall. ABC journalist Leigh Sales makes a point of routinely retweeting screenshots of the vile, often sexual, ‘feedback’ she receives after interviewing male politicians on The 7.30 Report. Sales declined to be interviewed for this piece, saying that she prefers to just leave existing comments regarding Twitter to ‘speak for themselves’. And indeed they speak volumes.

Twitter is a blunt, crude, and highly effective tool to bring about the annihilation of another human being

Likewise, it is hard to imagine a man receiving the same level of hostility that Baxendale was subjected to, although she notes the issue of gender is not clear-cut. As she points out: ‘The worst abuse was from men, but about seventy per cent of the abuse was from women, and it was quite personal,’ she says. ‘Sexism is not just expressed by men.’

Not everyone views cancel culture as a problem, with some writers defending the movement as an inelegant form of redress, an attempt at democratising our hallowed institutions. They view the complaints about cancel culture as confirmation of the old guard’s desire to resist change, to keep marginalised people outside positions of power, or to cause injury to others with harmful expression.

The question of course is: who gets to decide what is harmful, and, assuming it is harmful, who decides what the ‘punishment’ should be? Defenders of cancel culture are insisting on a punitive form of justice that is neither legislated nor agreed upon. While Twitter occasionally produces meaningful change and activism, such as the #MeToo movement against sexual abuse and harassment, the overwhelming tendency of the site is to engender insult and reactionary mob kickback. The ensuing destruction this causes to people’s lives far outweighs the site’s positive contribution to society.

In a speech by journalist George Packer published in The Atlantic earlier this year, entitled ‘The Enemies of Writing’, Packer lamented the rise of writers as members of an identifiable community. The unfortunate consequence was that writers ‘learn to avoid expressing thoughts or associating with undesirables that might be controversial with the group and hurt their numbers’. As he so beautifully puts it:

A writer who carries the thought police around in his head, who always feels compelled to ask: Can I say this? Do I have a right? Is my terminology correct? Will my allies get angry? Will it help my enemies? Could it get me ratioed on Twitter? – that writer’s words will soon become lifeless. A writer who’s afraid to tell people what they don’t want to hear has chosen the wrong trade.

This year, more voices have spoken up alongside Packer’s, most notably a high-profile group of more than 150 writers in the now-infamous Harper’s magazine letter that called for open debate and tolerance for opposing views. Most recently, musician Nick Cave spoke out against cancel culture, which he deemed to be ‘bad religion run amuck’. The intellectual freedom they are advocating is not remotely possible on Twitter, which, with its tribalism and cancellations, has a deadening effect on original writing, shoehorning ideas into inviolable truths, and discouraging intellectual curiosity. The kind of free thinking that is required to write interestingly, with élan and a sense of daring, involves doubt and uncertainty, sometimes confusion. It may involve the ability to hold opposing concepts in one’s mind without needing to assert a clear moral position. Any artist or writer who has ever followed a hunch, been led by an idea rather than the other way around, understands the fatal mistake of introducing certainty, let alone ideology, into the creative life.

Equally, journalists are at risk of falling prey to mob mentality, with many, no doubt, fearing being cancelled, trolled, or abused via the platform. Journalists should be contrarian in their work, but Twitter’s playground psychology of likes and retweets, its display of ‘followers’, are anathema to the very grown-up work of keeping the powerful in check, of maintaining a healthy scepticism towards popular ideas. Journalists on Twitter are encouraged to be joiners, to define themselves by the opinions they hold and the thinkers they support. Some journalists handle this bind better than others – limiting their time on social media, blocking trolls, and refusing to engage in the vapid fights between the right and left-wing Pied Pipers of public opinion – but it’s easy to imagine that at least some journalists self-edit, mentally scanning their next piece for how it will play out on Twitter, careful not to upset the mob or to advance an idea that runs counter to their tribe’s values.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is well aware of the problems with his site. Speaking on The New York Times podcast The Daily, he admitted that he is considering retrofitting checks and balances, including preventing users from retweeting articles if they haven’t clicked on the piece in a bid to curtail the spread of misinformation. While pointing out that online abuse and harassment have long been features of social media, Dorsey conceded: ‘It’s not to say that we didn’t incentivise different ways of amplifying the behaviours that already existed.’ Dorsey has been speaking about the need for change on Twitter for many years, announcing in 2016 – the year keen tweeter Donald Trump was elected – that the site had to become more palatable for the average person. We are yet to see meaningful change.

Meanwhile, it will be up to writers and journalists to define the terms of their engagement, if any, with Twitter, to challenge the groupthink of social media users, and to remain open to opinions that are different from their own and to the possibility of changing one’s mind. We will need to kill the inner critic who warns against advancing certain ideas because someone, somewhere, may find it offensive, while at the same time resisting the urge to finger-point at others’ mistakes or transgressions, to inflate our own ego with public ‘gotcha’ moments. We may find that by doing this, by observing rather than joining in, and by privileging a controversial idea over a safe bet, something original emerges.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.