The Philosophy of Twitter
Founded in 2006 following the tech boom, Twitter, primarily a short form text based social media platform is an unparalleled network for ideation and virtual interaction. Ever since its founding users enjoyed the ability to freely speak their mind, exchange ideas, argue, promote, and connect. It is reported that 23% of American adults use Twitter daily thus giving Twitter massive control over mainstream American politics, economics and even foreign affairs. At first we saw the influence of Twitter’s users during the 2016 election when Former President Trump leveraged the platform to bulk his political campaign. Trump's followers engaged with the transparency the platform afforded him regardless of whether or not it was true and or vicious low ball attacks on minorities. This demonstration was a pivotal moment for the American consciousness concerning the virality of information both true and false via social media. The ability to freely and instantaneously interact with a large portion of the population turned heads and raised eyebrows for good reason. For at least as long as I’ve been around, it’s been common knowledge to ignore the perspective objectivity of information presented online, but what happens when world leaders, CEOs, and organizers speak their truth? Unless users prescribe to strict perspectivism and skepticism and take that information with a grain of salt, they’re highly susceptible to the dangers of misinformation. But one must ask what is truly misinformation? Is it a construct of a political agenda? Is it a marketing campaign? Maybe malignant social defamation? Or is it the same issue Socrates pondered twenty-four centuries ago? Maybe David Humes principle of induction is true, society will never progress and we will forever be confined to the uniformity of nature because after twenty-four centuries of well documented existence we’ve seemingly progressed no further than Socrates. If that were accurate and we’re ignorant of the collusion due to our egos fed by our shiny and advanced society relative to society in 400 B.C. then we’d have no way to track our journey to objective truth because we’d delude ourselves to believing in historical relativism in which no progress towards an objective is possible because the idea of the objective is not constant throughout time. Instead I’d apply Plato’s ideas of objectivity to our current day, Twitter, and our society by arguing that “Since the physical world is constantly changing, sense perception only gives us relative and temporary information about changing, particular things. […] Ultimate Knowledge must be objective, unchanging, and universal. Furthermore there is a difference between true opinions and knowledge for our beliefs must be rationally justified to qualify as knowledge.” Plato also professes that without an idea of the objective we cannot pursue it. As a single proof of the universal objectives we can consider the evolution of justice in America over 250 years from slavery, to abolition, to reform, equality, and equity all in accelerated succession. These things happened because people's ideas were failing. Slave labor was empirically failing. Inequality was empirically failing. Equality is empirically failing. So we form a posteriori knowledge based on those failed experiences and come up with new solutions. As a result we essentially innovate on justice proving there must be an objective. This is where Twitter comes back into the story, the internet has been a great medium to collaborate, communicate, innovate, and learn. But Twitter serves a special, more philosophical purpose relative to the rest of the internet. Twitter is the hub for freely exchanging ideas upon which to improve through discussion and especially discourse, but it’s not just talking about our ideas and the problems of the world but getting people to take notice and most importantly take action. It doesn’t matter if you're a senator, a journalist or an average joe, you have a voice on Twitter. A voice that can create change. No one party or account controls the narrative, the discussions you have are your own. There have been attempts to control the narrative by Twitter themselves to try and adhere to an agenda however the users have often overruled them or called them out, so miss information is declared by the voice of the people and is over written. Collectively when things are unjust we demand justice, when things appear false we declare it, and when we have good ideas we share them and they go viral thus accelerating the path towards the objectives of life. The sooner we find the faults in our knowledge the closer we’ll get to finding the non-contradictory, empirical, knowledge of the objectives that lie beyond.