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This most disconcerting thing about this tweet going viral is finding out how many men sincerely think they do all of their best learning by challenging random people on the internet. I’m worried about this.
If you insist on talking to shitty people, you’re gonna end up absorbing shitty ideas. Learning to identify bad ideas is not something to take for granted. Continually exposing yourself to nonsense thinking it doesn’t have an impact on you is naive and dangerous.
I dealt with a lot of trolls this week. But also talked to a lot of men who I’m pretty sure were authentic. So many of them had the same weird and ridiculous script about how twitter is a “public forum” and if you don’t like it you should leave or make your account private.
It started to feel eerie how similar they all sounded. This repetition of the same dogmatic framing over and over. It feels pretty clear to me that a lot of men have been indoctrinated with this. But few of them could describe to me where they got it from.
On the bright side, there were many, many men and people who aren’t men who appreciated the thread or told me that it made them reconsider a lot of their behavior. It actually is possible to learn and grow from interactions on the internet.
I sincerely believe that most of us are okay. We all have a lot to learn, but we generally want to do better. The problem is social media allows for toxic ideas to propagate widely. Even a small percentage of bad actors feels like an epidemic when it’s out of a billion people.
