“Just don’t look at your mentions, that’s where all the terrible stuff happens.”
It was a couple years ago when I was on assignment doing a lengthy feature piece for this website. The day before the game I was going to cover I was invited out to meet some of the crew for breakfast as something of an introduction as I’d be invading their space for the next 36 hours.
As we sat down at breakfast, I was surrounded by 5-6 well known national television personalities as the topic of discussion turned to Twitter. One of the individuals was having second thoughts about the platform and not actively tweeting at the time. That’s when a colleague championed the platform as a wonderful resource of news and real-time information. Then he leaned over and said the above quote – just don’t look at your mentions, that’s where all the terrible stuff happens.
That’s a quote that has always stuck with me. Because when I think of Twitter, I like to think of all of its positives. It’s safe to say that we wouldn’t be where we are today without Twitter – it’s on Twitter where AA developed a decent following, it’s Twitter that is our number one referral source, it’s Twitter where we get so many great submissions and tips for stories.
But for all of the great and revolutionary things about Twitter, the amount of crap that people on Twitter have to deal with on a daily basis is frightening.
There are two recent stories that bring this to light – both from very different sectors of the sports world – but both revealing the same truth. Don’t look at your mentions.
First, Julie DiCaro of CSN Chicago detailed for Sports Illustrated all the vile, disgusting messages she has received on Twitter for her coverage of the Patrick Kane rape investigation. If you’ll click on the link, you’ll see an assortment of four letter words and insults that have no place in a public forum, let alone as acceptable communication between two human beings.
Second, Eleven Warriors recounted abusive tweets received by Ohio State quarterback Cardale Jones after the Buckeyes narrowly avoided an upset at Indiana. If you’ll click on the link, you’ll see Jones being told how much he sucked by a number of people in spite of A) Winning the game, B) Throwing for 245 yards in the victory, C) Winning a national championship, and D) Being 8-0 as a starting QB. What kind of megalomaniac tweets such things to a college athlete when their team wins?!?! Could you imagine what Joe Bauserman would have suffered through if he was on Twitter?
Instead of featuring any of those tweets and giving them more airplay, here’s a more helpful reminder:
https://twitter.com/erikmal/status/499761684009873409
Multiple people featured in both articles either deleted their tweets or their accounts entirely, not willing to stand beside some of the awful things they put their name to. All of them couldn’t resist the opportunity to inflict harm on someone else. All of them deserve to have their tweets brought out from the seedy underbelly of Twitter so that maybe just one person learns that you actually have to take responsibility for what you tweet.
It’s astounding that people think they can tweet without consequences. The warning stories about real people losing real jobs and real opportunities because of abusive tweets should be enough, but it isn’t. There was the college baseball player kicked off his team for calling Mo’Ne Davis a derogatory word. And the kid suspended for tweeting reprehensible things about Curt Schilling’s daughter. And the suspensions for New England bozos tweeting racist stuff about NHL player Joel Ward. All of their lives transformed for making a dumb mistake on Twitter. And yet this kind of abusive behavior on Twitter is not a new development.
Just take a look at the mentions of every single high-profile recruit. Without doubt, fans of rival schools bombard the athlete – who is a high school teenager – with the worst of humanity. It’s not just a general “F— you” either, it’s also wishes for broken legs and worse. And it happens time and time and time again. Without fail, the next great high school recruit will have to deal with the same garbage from the same fringe extreme of sports fandom.
What is it about Twitter that causes people to think that they can get away with saying these kinds of things to another person? Maybe it’s because while social media makes our world so much smaller, there’s still an inherent disconnect.
Simultaneously, modern culture is now closer together and further apart than ever before. Sit in a room when every person is on their smartphone and you’ll see the manifestation of this phenomenon. We’ve forgotten to have conversations like human beings. Instead of walking up a flight of stairs to talk to someone, it’s much easier and more convenient to text instead.
When you’re tweeting a message to a profile picture and a username, it’s much different than if you’re saying it face to face. It’s easy to forget that there’s a real person on the other side who might see that tweet and have real human emotions about it. Hopefully people see these stories and are discouraged from engaging in such destructive behavior – not just so we could live in a more utopian world where we’re all singing campfire songs and living out Coke commercials… but so that they don’t sacrifice their careers over one dumb tweet.
Take a step back and play out a thought experiment…
If you’re an Ohio State fan, what’s the end goal of telling Cardale Jones that you think he’s a terrible quarterback? Do you want to brag to your friends at the bar that he blocked you on Twitter as if it’s some kind of modern day merit badge? Is that really a feather in your cap you want put in your obituary as one of your great life accomplishments? Do you think that your one tweet will somehow light a fire under him and motivate him to achieve further greatness as if he doesn’t have coaches and teammates that will already do that for him? Do you think Urban Meyer will read your tweet and hire you to his staff because thanks to you he finally saw the light about this player’s true football ability?
Moreover, what does it say about you that you’re willing to tweet something like “you’re so trash it’s hard to watch I hope you know that” to a guy that just won a national championship eight months ago? If there’s a better example of neurotic, ungrateful, entitled behavior I have yet to encounter it on planet earth.
Admittedly, this is just a narrow thought experiment that doesn’t even speak to the wider systemic cultural problems and nasty “-isms” that Twitter illuminates.
What’s the solution? Don’t tweet at people. Seriously. Unless you can interact with people on Twitter like they are real human beings, take Erik Malinowski’s advice and just don’t tweet. It’s not worth it. Never has been and never will be. All you’re doing by tweeting insults at a famous athlete or a sports reporter or anyone in between is chipping away at your own dignity. Nobody in this world ever gained anything by tweeting “you suck” to another person. So just stop.
As someone who is a supporter of Twitter, my biggest fear is that like the white walkers coming south of the wall, the platform is overrun with so much negativity that it’s no longer worth it. That as more and more volatility becomes Twitter’s hallmark instead of its achilles heel, we all decide to step away one by one. Either Twitter decides to do something to be more proactive in stopping abuse or we all collectively decide that we’re just going to stop the madness. If not, Twitter will just become a sea of angry people yelling at no one.
