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Month: December 2024

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Should You Keep Using Twitter?

Twitter (or “X”, as no one calls it), isn’t what it used to be. Traffic has plummeted at the social media network, while rivals Bluesky and Threads have seen their userbases skyrocket. For any longtime Twitter users, it’s probably not surprising why this is the case: Musk has made a series of widely criticized decisions since his takeover, the results of which have been a failure to curb hate speech, a proliferation of white supremacist accounts, and numerous questionable actions by Musk himself. Add to that the plethora of technical changes that have irked Twitter’s users, and you can understand why Bluesky was recently the most popular download on Apple’s App Store.

Not everyone is unhappy with Twitter under Musk’s command, of course. His outspoken support of Trump has made him popular with the political right, and a casual scroll through a Twitter feed will reveal that many of the most visible and promoted posts tend to espouse right-wing views. Bluesky, on the other hand, is being portrayed as a safe haven for those on the left, with many pundits opining that left-wing users are leaving Twitter specifically because they’re looking for a space where people are more likely to share their views.

This picture is, I think, too simplistic. As many users have noticed, it is less the desire to find people of the same general political orientation that ultimately caused the move, and more the desire not to have one’s replies be overrun by bots or be called racial slurs by people who have paid for the right to have their voices amplified.

Regardless of the motivation, some have argued that the exodus of Twitter contributes to the formation of echo chambers, resulting in spaces where users listen only to those who share the same beliefs and express values in the same ways. For example, in The Globe and Mail:

[T]he flight to Bluesky is a concern, not because X is the superior platform, but because at a moment when persuasion and communication are vital, Mr. Trump’s loudest and most influential critics are building an echo chamber… if the aim is to defeat authoritarianism, I’m not persuaded that Bluesky helps.

Similarly, The Telegraph claims that:

[T]he shift [of left-leaning users away from Twitter] has led to accusations of Bluesky becoming an “echo chamber”, as users promote so-called block lists to hide Republican-leaning accounts from their timeline.

At The New York Times:

Liberals moving away from X are giving up on the 20th-century ideal of a public sphere… migrating Bluesky users are signaling political separation from an increasingly conservative X and giving up on the idea of a town square that holds all voices simultaneously.

And the Independent quotes right-wing political commenter Toby Young, who claims that: “[o]ne of the ironies of people on the Left deserting X for Bluesky is that they are often the very same people who complain about how politics has become ‘too polarised’.”

If you’re considering leaving Twitter, should you? Or are you obligated to stay, and try to keep the dream of bipartisan discourse in the public sphere alive?

Many of those commenting on the issue seem to think that we do have such an obligation. After all, echo chambers are bad insofar as when we are in one, we risk losing out on hearing information from different voices, and may get stuck in our ways when there are no critical eyes to challenge us. Echo chambers can happen in any context, but are perhaps most concerning when they are delineated across political lines. Discourse across the political spectrum is a sign of a healthy democracy, and so we at least have some reason to try to ensure that we make such discourse possible.

Here we have the makings of an argument: if you’re a left-leaning Twitter user who leaves Twitter for Bluesky, then you will contribute to creating echo chambers on both social media platforms. But we have reason to think that echo chambers are bad, if not just in general, then for democracy (and perhaps the “public sphere”) in particular. So: you should stay on Twitter.

While this argument isn’t stated explicitly in the passages above, the idea is that choosing social media platforms now comes with the added responsibility of contributing to increasingly polarized discourse online. Although many who have left Twitter have expressed frustration with the inability to engage with those they disagree with in a productive, civil way, shouldn’t that be more reason for them to stay and try to make things better?

I think we do have a general obligation to listen to and engage with those who disagree with us. But the obligation is pro tanto; in other words, it can be overridden by other duties that we have towards others, and to ourselves.

For instance, while discourse is important, it should not require that one martyr oneself in the name of the public sphere: our duties to our own well-being outweigh the duty to entertain Twitter trolls. Furthermore, if an attempt at discourse is met with hate and closed-mindedness, the obligation to improve that discourse falls squarely on the hateful and closed-minded – or else on the platform to step in as moderator. The thought that it is the responsibility of those leaving Twitter to make Twitter better puts the blame on the wrong shoulders.

The questions around the segregation of social networks have become more urgent not only because the exodus of users to Twitter-alternatives seems to reflect an increasingly divided American society, but because the social media landscape feels like it is at a tipping point. It’s unclear how equilibrium will be established. Will the upstart social media platforms fizzle out with everyone eventually returning to Twitter (perhaps even finally calling it “X” as penance)? Or will Twitter dry up into a husk of what it once was, sold off for a substantial loss once Musk gets bored with it? Or will we reach a third point, where there are equally popular but polarized networks that segregate views along rough political lines?

At this point, it’s impossible to tell. Despite the rhetoric, however, if you’re a long-time Twitter user who’s been looking for a change, you shouldn’t feel bad about leaving.

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Only Those Here Illegally Need Fear?

The threat of illegal immigration was a drumbeat during Trump’s campaign. The now president-elect railed against “migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world” and “vile animals,”  describing the United States as “occupied territory” and a “garbage can for the world.”  For many, this rhetoric painted a grim picture of an aggressively anti-immigrant president, one gearing up to unleash misery through state violence, deportation camps, and police raids. Yet, Trump enjoyed fairly high levels of support among legal immigrants. The Trump campaign also made in-roads with Latinos, many of whom have recent immigrant roots.

One explanation of this seeming disconnect, is that just because someone is an immigrant does not mean that immigration policy is their most important issue — they could have disagreed with Trump on this matter and voted for him for other reasons. Another is dueling interpretations of Trump on immigration. For detractors, Trump is opposed to immigrants. For supporters, Trump is simply opposed to illegality and crime.

This narrative, that law-abiding immigrants have nothing to fear, relies on a neat division between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants. However, legality is not some objective physical fact about someone, but rather a determination made by a government. Moreover, it is a contested category. Precisely one of the questions up for debate is what constitutes a legal immigrant and what kind of process prospective immigrants should have to go through to obtain that status. How such categories are defined – legal or illegal immigrant – determines who is a vilified law-breaker and who is a welcome newcomer as well as what political actions are justified. The last major legislative immigration reform, signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986, granted amnesty to almost 3 million illegal immigrants. With the stroke of a pen, millions of criminals disappeared. Could they be conjured just as easily?

An analysis of the Trump administration’s policies (or for that matter any administration’s) on legal immigrants requires two prongs: first, what changes there are in policies targeted at legal immigrants, and second, what changes there are in the designation of who counts as “legal.” Although the incoming Trump administration’s full policies have yet to emerge, there are indications that the boundaries of legality and illegality are being redrawn.

Stephen Miller, a key Trump policy advisor, indicated that “denaturalizations,” or the removal of citizenship, would be “supercharged” in the second term. During Trump’s first term, the administration aggressively reviewed old immigration paperwork for discrepancies and pursued denaturalization in court. What discrepancies merit denaturalization will likely emerge as a key question in the returning administration. The first Trump administration also attempted to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides some deferral of deportation and access to work permits for those who immigrated as children. DACA is currently before the famously right-wing Fifth Circuit Court, and it is unlikely the Trump administration will advocate for its preservation.  The incoming administration may also target the Bush Sr.-era Temporary Protected Status program, which provides temporary residency and work permits to hundreds of thousands of immigrants fleeing circumstances such as war, political violence, or disaster. It was a target during the first administration and seems likely to be in the crosshairs again. Many Haitians, the focus of Trump’s erroneous claim about immigrants eating dogs and cats, are legally here under the Temporary Protected Status program. Most prominently, Trump has repeatedly asserted that he would be interested in ending automatic citizenship, or birthright citizenship, for those born in the United States to undocumented parents.

Assuredly, there are substantive questions to ask about these programs. What level of review (if any) should previously approved immigration paperwork face and when should that lead to denaturalization? Do those who arrived illegally as children deserve a pathway to citizenship and what should that path look like? On what grounds should Temporary Protected Status be granted, how long should “temporary” be, and what does the off-ramp look like? Notably though, these questions are not simply about enforcing the law against clear categories of immigrants. They relate to who qualifies as a legal immigrant in the first place.

Legality and illegality are contested in a second way as well, namely, in their connection to morality. There is an appealingly straightforward analysis available: If someone broke the law (e.g., by immigrating illegally), then they should have to face consequences. However, even before we get to considerations of just what these consequences should be, this analysis assumes that the underlying law is just. But what if the ethical legitimacy of the underlying law is precisely what is being disputed? In such cases, merely invoking illegality can mask an underlying debate about what immigration law should be and who should be a legal immigrant.

One way of understanding current political speech is that “illegal” is not used by the Trump movement to describe a particular relationship with the current law, but rather in a more metaphorical sense. One might consider the term illegal immigrant to be an “ideograph,” which appears to have a specific technical definition but is in actuality more symbolic — in this case, “illegal immigrant” as shorthand for an undesirable or criminal immigrant. Naturally, immigrant supporters of Trump would not see themselves in this category. However, even if this provides a compelling explanation of Trump’s rhetoric and its varied interpretations, it reveals little about forthcoming policies and who will be affected by them.

Ultimately, the designation “Illegal” serves as a reminder of the complex relationship between policy and language, especially when those policies deal with contested categories. Will Trump’s policies only affect illegal immigrants? Perhaps. But his administration will decide the breadth of those policies’ scope by first pronouncing what it means to be here legally.

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On Deceit and Being a Bad Human

photograph of person in tin foil hat consuming media

In the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, a number of candidates and news outlets claimed the nation was in the throes of a migrant crime wave.

But no such crime wave exists.

In 2023, a record 2.3 million immigrants crossed the southern U.S. border. Yet in that same year, the border states of Texas and Arizona saw 15% and 8.8% reductions in violent crime respectively. And that’s precisely what we’d expect, given the numerous studies showing that undocumented immigration doesn’t increase violent crime. In fact, it decreases it. That’s because migrants commit crimes at a far lower rate than others. In fact, relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes. Even absent this data, the very notion of a migrant crime wave should invite scepticism. Why? Because it defies common sense. Why would someone who has sacrificed so much for a better life in the U.S. jeopardize all that by committing a crime, thereby risking detection and deportation?

Yet many doggedly believed these deceits (alongside similarly tall tales like other immigrants eating pets and schools secretly sending children for gender-affirming care). In some cases, these claims were downright lies. In others, however, they might better be categorized as mere bullshit. (Yes, that’s a technical term.) If I tell you something that I know to not be true, I lie. But if I tell you something without knowing or caring if it’s true, I bullshit. Suppose I see my neighbor preparing to spend the day blowing leaves around his garden – a practice I vehemently despise. He looks up at the sky in concern, and asks me if I think it’ll rain. Without a second thought, I respond with “Yes, definitely.” In doing so, I don’t lie. Perhaps it will rain today. Or perhaps it won’t. I don’t actually know. I say what I say merely to bring a stop to my neighbor’s leaf blowing plans.

When we bullshit, we don’t set out to convey truth or falsity, but to achieve some other goal. And that’s precisely what’s going on with fabricated crises like the migrant crime wave. They’re meant to achieve a particular purpose – to manipulate people to vote in a certain way.

Whether by lie or bullshit, deception is morally problematic. And we don’t have to look very far to find an ethical theory that explains why. But so, too, can it be wrong for us to allow ourselves to be deceived. After initiating my online investigation into the “migrant crime wave,” it took me less than two minutes to uncover troves of peer-reviewed, empirical data laying bare the deceit that so many had insisted on spreading. Put simply: we have little excuse for ignorance. This is important, because – as my fellow author, Wes Siscoe, has previously argued – there is an obligation on us to be intellectually responsible.

And that’s where philosophy comes in.

As teachers, we like to think we make a difference. We like to think the lessons we teach will make a lasting and meaningful impact on our students. But I’m not naive. I don’t expect that, years from now, my students will remember the Hohfeldian incidents of rights, or that they’ll be able to flawlessly recite the Humanity Formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. My hope, however, is that they’ll remember the methodology of philosophy, if not its content.

I begin each of my classes by telling my students that philosophy is, in its most basic form, all about thinking carefully. It’s about taking a look at our beliefs and asking ourselves why we believe the things we do. We shouldn’t hold a belief merely because it’s popular, or enduring, or because it’s dictated to us by those in power. Instead, we should adopt beliefs because they’re supported by good reasons. Why? Why not simply adopt the beliefs that are most convenient, or most compatible with the way we already see the world? Because false beliefs aren’t helpful. And the better our reasoning – the more careful we are in selecting the beliefs we adopt and reject – the more likely we are to hold beliefs that are true.

The hope harbored by myself (and, I assume, many other teachers of philosophy) is that somewhere down the road, some of this will stick. That one day one of our students will think just a little more carefully about one very important belief, and in doing so make a better decision than they might otherwise have made.

The ability to think carefully is of critical importance in our political decision-making. Why? Because our political choices are moral choices, and those choices can harm others. And here’s the thing: When we allow our rationality to be circumvented, we not only risk being a bad human, but also being a bad human. How? Porphyry of Tyre defined man as a “rational animal.” What makes us unique among the animal kingdom, then, is our ability to act with reasons. Thus, on this definition, when we allow ourselves to be deceived – when we fail to do the bare minimum of due diligence in investigating the claims of others – we also fail at being human.