The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad

Why no one ever leaves the ‘hellsite’

There was something of a trend in the late 2000s for former hell-raising journalists to start more sedate publications because they felt that society was changing, and people didn’t want to drink and party as much as they used to. It was heralded as the end of the ‘new lad’ and the rise of a more mature outlook among men, largely by culture journalists whose job it is to invent societal trends.

And I remember reading these articles and always thinking ‘isn’t this just you getting old?’ None of my friends go out and get pissed four times a week anymore - what does this say about British society?

I’ve long felt the same about Twitter, that while it’s immensely useful as a resource for news and information, and interacting with friends, I’ve got to the stage where it’s not fun. But that’s probably just middle age, and at a certain point people should avoid too much time joking around on social media, lest they become Facebook boomer memes. (Or, in Britain, go to jail.)

This week I was on the Spectator Americano podcast talking about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, following my recent post on how he had changed the nature of the place. (I promise this is the last time I write about every journalist’s favourite social media site for at least two weeks.)

Everyone claims to hate Twitter, I pointed out, but they never leave. I actually started writing this piece a few months back, and noted that many people have bailed out from ‘X’, as no one calls it, among them academic Kathleen Stock, satirist Andrew Doyle and Labour politician Dawn Butler.

I’ve had to rewrite this because I think they’re all back now. In fact almost everyone who leaves the Hellsite soon returns; it’s a running joke, because we’re all addicted. I checked in on Threads the other day and it was full of people expressing their relief about breaking their Twitter habit and finding a new home. We shall see.

Others, like Alastair Campbell, have set up accounts on Bluesky but still proclaim their intention to stay on Twitter to fight the far-Right. Okay, sure.

Stock and Doyle seemed to be leaving in part because of the toxicity of their own side, in their case gender-critical feminists, and this kind of unpleasantness can indeed feel worse than when it comes from opponents. Watching online debates about immigration, for instance, I’m often reminded of GK Chesterton’s famous quote about pity and truth:

‘The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.’

On one side will be vaguely establishment figures repeating arguments that feel warm-hearted and kind but also untrue, and on the other, mostly anonymous users citing a wealth of studies to show that the situation is actually much worse than that, and clearly having better arguments, while often being incredibly unpleasant and personal to the journalists involved. The fact that anonymous users are often the most informed and insightful accounts adds to the Chestertonian feel.

Obviously it’s always been a bit horrible. Twitter in its early years was a very different creature, in part because it was much smaller, and people would be far more open about writing whatever came into their heads. A Labour MP recently got in trouble for old tweets about ‘Estonian retards’ from 2009, but this was typical of the age; I don’t think it’s an especially serious offence, although if you want to become an MP you probably should delete all your old posts.

As the site grew larger, it became unwise to post edgy material and so this became the preserve of anonymous accounts, while the rest of us retreated into private DM groups to express our true thoughts.

The nastiness is nothing new; recall the woman who became temporarily the most hated person on earth for an off-colour joke about Africa. As Louise Perry wrote about Twitter, the impossibility of physical confrontation pushes it towards a more female strategy of bullying.

Part of the problem is that deliberately moralising terms like ‘disgusting’ work in driving engagement, so confrontation is incentivised, and there are lots of people who don’t want to prove you wrong, but wish to morally destroy your argument and you; engaging in controversial political discourse will make it easier for them to do so.

But it’s still relatively easy to avoid the toxic element, and most of the victims of this sort of behaviour are themselves dishing it out. Personally, I avoid the temptation to dunk, even if someone is especially annoying online, not just because I don’t like it happening to me and I’m too agreeable (ie cowardly). Journalists are especially easy to despise as a group if you spend time on Twitter but in real life they’re usually fun and kind, even some of the most acidic in print.

I do sometimes wonder if, career-wise, it makes sense to go for a strategy of maximum feuding in public life, since many of the great public intellectuals have been defined by their great vendettas. It probably does, but most of what happens on Twitter is hardly of a Gore Vidal/William F Buckley calibre.

Social media is widely blamed for polarisation, but its real downside is to ruin the reputation of institutions, professions and the individuals who comprise them. The Met’s Twitter feed has been especially bad at reducing trust in the police this past year, which is part of a worrying trend towards declining faith in British institutions. Writers who create the most thoughtful prose can produce a Twitter feed splurge of ill-thought-out anger. Occasionally one of the great broadcasters or editors from my youth will post something so inane that the most charitable explanation is cognitive decline, and BBC journalists who leave the corporation too often reveal both their clear ideological motivations and lack of thought once free to do so.

This is far worse for academics and especially lawyers, who we all previously assumed were cunning 4D-chess strategists cooking up ingenious ways to get our money; at least with journalists, most people suspected them of being irrational neurotics beforehand. As Ian Leslie recently put it, having a Twitter account will make you more famous, but it won’t make you more respected. 

The natural mood of the site is pessimism, and there are indeed some things which appear to be getting worse. Musk is a free-speech maximalist, which I am not, because freedom requires civility; the problem with the old system was not censorship as such, but that they were censoring in a highly partial way. Now there seems to be no censorship at all, so if you’re foolish enough to turn on the ‘for you’ setting you end up seeing literal snuff videos, while the proliferation of PUSSY IN BIO content is not ideal. Since Twitter is for many people the front page of the internet, it’s bizarre that it can become a free-for-all, including violent and pornographic content; conservatives don’t normally support this.

Then there is the huge growth in overtly misogynistic accounts, which seem to be everywhere claiming that women (or at least white women) are all money-grabbing sluts with an immense body count (the number one phrase to mute). What Ben Sixsmith calls the Nu-Misogynists are depressingly ubiquitous in the new regime. Perhaps it’s just that Twitter is currently like having all television channels placed in your direction all at once, and it will take better technology to screen out those worlds you’d rather not know about.

Perhaps the worst thing is the proliferation of what can only be called ‘slop merchants’, commentators offering basement level political takes, as well as engagement farmers, while monetising has made that problem worse. Then there is the repetitiveness; all the same videos, all the same memes and jokes, over and over again, rather like in the days of channel surfing.

The atmosphere can be bleak; recently I saw one large account gloating over a woman’s son dying of a drug overdose because they dislike her political opinions (I also dislike her opinions). It turned out that the woman in question was also dying of cancer.

But I don’t really understand the people who complain about the hellsite because in most cases, it’s just a hellsite of their own creation. For most people it’s fun, and like Leslie, I’ve made a lot of good friends on Twitter, which ‘blurs the boundaries between professional and personal which lends itself to friend-making’; it’s also a terrific resource for learning about history, like being able to gain insights from dozens of the most interesting academics every day.

I hope the former Blue Tick class don’t all leave for Bluesky, Mastodon or all those strange other worlds one hears about, and I don’t think they will, because Twitter is a natural monopoly. The site would also be a lesser place without them, since every successful society needs its liberal elite, even if they can be insufferable.

The thing about those lad’s mag journalists from the Noughties is that, while they were getting old, they were onto something. British alcohol consumption peaked in 2000, and since then there has been a general trend away from partying, casual sex and all that. Sometimes the social trend you pick up on is just a facet of your mental state and those you choose to talk to, but sometimes it’s real. So maybe it’s not me being old; maybe Twitter is just not fun anymore.