Twitter Derangement Syndrome

Here's a thought shared by many:

Social media is driving us all insane.

And by "insane," I don't mean a little neurotic. I mean foaming at the mouth, bat-shit, nucking futz!

According to Tristan Harris, the man behind the landmark documentary, "The Social Dilemma," there are entire programs of study, at Stanford, at Harvard, at many other prestigious universities, wholly devoted to the study of what grabs human attention, and keeps it.

Not classes. Programs.

These schools of thought have been training the corporate leaders which drive our social media algorithms to gear them solely toward increasing engagement. The algorithms behind Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and many others, don't give a damn about what drives the engagement. They only care that the user is engaged, and that such engagement increases. If it increases due to right-wing extremism, or conspiracy mongering, or religious zealotry, or anger, or fear, or outright lies, all of that in ancillary to the machine that drives the increased engagement. The user is interacting more - fuck everything else.

Your commitment to the social media is all that matters.

Nowhere is the impact of this more evident than the cesspool that Twitter/X has become. Elon Musk bought it up, lost a crap-ton of money on it, but gained an outsized influence upon one of the biggest social media platforms. It paid off, in as much as Musk was (arguably) able to influence the 2024 election more than anyone realized. It goes without saying that his opinions, forced upon all users whether they liked it or not, were not of the pre-Trump quality that we came to expect from Elon Musk before.

(I mean, let's be honest: Electric cars, space exploration... these are not the sorts of things pursued by retrograde Christian-nationalist dipshits marching people back towards the Middle Ages. Elon Musk once had clout among those who enjoyed watching TED and the Big Bang Theory. How the mighty have fallen...)

But this happened because first Elon Musk himself was sucked in by Twitter algorithms. They radicalized him. And when the Babylon Bee had its account suspended on Twitter, he hauled off and bought the entire platform.

In other words, Elon himself so loved the thing which poisoned his mind, he took over the whole thing. Just so that his favorite radicalization memes wouldn't get blocked from his eyes.

Or yours.

Social media has been very effective at spreading a particularly pernicious idea, that "Trump Derangement Syndrome," (a.k.a. "TDS") is actually the derangement caused by the rejection of Trump, rather than the purely sane reaction to someone so dastardly. Such a purely upside-down mindset could only have been promulgated by the unholy alliance between the Right-Wing Media Machine, and the increasingly powerful forces of social media.

But I have a radical proposal regarding "TDS." Given that right-wing radicalization is so often brought about by social media, "TDS" should be re-branded as "Twitter Derangement Syndrome."

(Yeah, yeah, I know, it's actually "X." But no. Just.... no.)

We may not be able to fully undo all the damage that social media has done to the conscience of the general public. But we can do one small thing to reclaim what we've lost down that hellhole. We can at least re-designate "TDS" as "Twitter Derangement Syndrome."

It seems the least we can do.

And it's a lot closer to the truth.

Eric

**