Thread by @DrSchwitters

Social media will only ever stop being a troll farm when there are costs to *not reining yourself in*.

Example: the Polemical Habitual Plural.

Mr Smith, your longterm political opponent, does something discreditable - or is credibly accused of doing something discreditable - on one occasion. Say he kills a rabbit - or is credibly accused of, etc. Say he's also been caught out in a lie (once).

Rein yourself in: "We know that Smith doesn't always tell the truth - and apparently he once killed a rabbit"
Let rip: "Smith, who lies and kills rabbits"
No, really, go mad: "What about all the lies Smith has told - and the rabbits he's killed?"

The Polemical Habitual Plural is justifiable, sort of, if you squint a bit - if you have killed a rabbit at least once, then by definition you are "the kind of person who kills rabbits" (on at least one occasion).

But it's wildly misleading - there's a huge difference between doing something once (or being credibly accused, etc) and doing it repeatedly or regularly; the second is much worse than the first, for a start. And it's really hard to argue against (because of that justification):

if you're admitting to doing something bad nobody cares if you only did it once; your argument is effectively "they never call me Stavros the Boatbuilder".

So it's a good hack: if someone's credibly accused of doing something once, you can mouth off about them doing it multiple times and/or habitually safe in the knowledge that they won't be able to defend themselves credibly.

But by the same token it's a very bad hack, tending to load people credibly accused of one (1) bad thing with bucketloads of opprobrium - and tending to make the people levelling the accusations believe their own rhetoric and grow stupider and more hateful.

People will do it, though, because it delivers the goods - in terms of polarising the debate and giving your side the advantage - and because there aren't any costs to failing to rein yourself in.

This train of thought was sparked off, not by a reference to Corbyn endorsing antisemitic murals (for once)[1], but by a tweet earlier today about the Suffragettes:

[1]*One* mural! He endorsed one *partially* antisemitic... oh never mind

"Packed train carriages"? That the Suffragettes had moved on from bombing and setting fire to empty property, and planted bombs intended to kill people, was news to me. A quick online search of Dr R's book - which I do intend to read - brought up one instance...

of explosive devices found in a train carriage full of passengers; they didn't go off (or not before they were discovered), so there were no casualties. Maybe there were others, I don't know. But the evidence that the WSPU bombed occupied "train carriages", plural, seems thin.

Everybody does it, to be fair. A trawl through Twitter could probably bring up examples of me doing it. Victor Jara did it, for goodness' sake (saying that right-wing students "played with bombs and assassinated Generals", when they'd killed *one* General...).