welp. i wrote and published my hottest take. Twitter is real life. nytimes.com/2020/02/19/opi…
I think saying it's not is an attempt at self-reflection by the media & the political elite. But i *also* think it's deployed by the pundit class as a clever bit of misdirection intended to make elites seem in touch while they protect their power.
searching around for tweets (lol) with the phrase "twitter is not real life" i saw them coming from a very particular type of center-leaning media/political establishment account 
Obviously no one online crossection is fully representative of the full spectrum of american political opinion! but enthusiasm matters. and — as @BuzzFeedBen pointed out last year — there's a fandom quality to political movements now that has a stand-in online.
@BuzzFeedBen Anyhow, as an experiment i'm gonna do a live chat here about this tomorrow at 2:30pm ET. Come and tell me how wrong I am in real life (on twitter)!
