Using Social Media For Good Or At Least Fun
In Tuesday’s debate, Vice President Harris showed her ability to dog-walk Trump into betraying his unfitness and his fury. If you hang out on social media much, you’ll see the same fury among his followers. They’re responding with vehement ugliness.
For the past several months I’ve been experimenting with my Xitter feed, trying to figure out some tactics for coping with these people. In this post I’ll lay out some of the things that seem to work, at least to make it more fun for me, and possibly to discourage some of them.
I think most of this works on any social media platform swarmed by the ignorant, the trollish, and the ugly, but I don’t use any of the others so I don’t know.
1. On Xitter, use lists. You probably only follow sane people, funny people, people who have some expertise in a field you care about, people whose views you want to read. Make private lists. These are lists that only you see and are not shared with others. I currently follow about 500 people. There are a lot of lawyers, a couple of philosophers, some funny people, a few journalists, and experts in science, economics, and finance. I selected a about 150 and put them on lists. I sorted the lists so that one has my current favorites, then one with second favorites, and a third for the rest. I move accounts around from time to time.
When I read Xitter on my phone I’m given columns at the top. One is the “for you” column. It’s loaded with Musk garbage, lunatic right-wingers, Qanon freaks, Covid deniers, anti-vaxxers, and other loons. I never read it. I don’t even update it. I just let it sit there in all it’s noxious glory. The next column is “following”. I read it when I’m waiting at a doctor’s office and expect to be sitting awhile. Then there are columns for each of my lists. I read them regularly.
On my desktop, I go directly to the button on the left column labeled lists and select one. That’s it. I don’t read Musk garbage.
2. One of the criteria I use for selecting for lists is the quality of the reposts I get. I follow several people who do a great job of reposting things I’m interested in.
3. I often reply to posts in my lists. I try to accomplish one of three things with those replies. First, adding some useful information. For example, if I see a post on something related to Project 2025, I often add a page citation and a link, encouraging people to see for themselves. Second, I try to be funny. It’s hit or miss on that.
4. The third goal is more open, I reply to some of the loons who have replied. I try never to respond to anyone with fewer than 300 followers, and lately more. If I do, it’s usually one or two words: Troll, Troll Alert, or “You seem smart,” which I stole from Lizz Winstead.
For MAGAs, I have several stock responses.
A) “You seem smart, can you tell me what Trump meant here?” Then I add one of several tweets I’ve bookmarked. One example is this from Judd Legum. It’s a collection of Trump’s nonsense. Another is this from Acyn, where Trump promises to bring back cement. I ask if they know where the cement went.
B) “You seem like a real patriot. Please empty your retirement account and send the money to Trump. If he doesn’t get elected, the world will collapse and you won’t need it.”
C) “You seem really angry. That can’t be good for you and your friends and family.”
D) “We got rid of our old guy, and he was a decent man who maybe lost a step. Why are you welded to your old guy who ignores every norm of human decency and who says weirdo stuff like this: [adding one of my links].”
5. You will get responses from some of these. I have some rules for handling them.
A) If they are seriously angry, mute and block. Life’s too short for that kind of nonsense.
B) Most of the replies are personal attacks. Often it’s homophobia, or you’re stupid, or “your a commie” [sic]. I never reply to the slur. Instead I keep the focus on them. An easy way is 4. (A) or (B) above or variations.
C) Check their Xitter profile. For crypto dudes and related finance types, I might go with “How much did you lose on $DJT, which is Trump’s social media company?” I often link to a Google search for that symbol, and set it to one year. It’s an ugly chart.
D) There’s a lot of obscenity and jerk behavior. I’ve been replying with some version of: “Ooh that’s ugly. It’s natural to be distressed after seeing your doddering old criminal get whipped by the Vice President, so maybe take a break from this site until you recover.” If they reply I continue in the same vein: “It’s okay: psychic pain is normal after a crushing defeat.” No matter what, keep the focus on them and their defects.
E) I make an exception for the anti-abortion crowd. I don’t see much of them unless they’re replying to a post from someone else. I generally reply with this link to an article on human reproduction by an embryologist, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ntls.20220041
I often suggest they need to learn about the reality, not what their preacher says. The goal is to get them to realize the dangers of pregnancy, and the actual facts about things like fetal heartbeats and fetal pain. I don’t think you can convince anyone, but maybe it’s a good first step to opening minds.
One common claim from rabid anti-abortion people is the execution after birth lie. This one is deeply rooted. A Chicago Sun-Times reporter attended a debate watch party sponsored by the Niles Township GOP; Niles Township is a suburb North of Chicago.
… [Attendees were in disbelief after Harris said, “Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion,” with audible claims that she’s lying or “full of s—t.”
My stock response to these ignorant people is: Killing babies is a crime. If you know of such a crime and don’t report it you are an accessory and are criminally liable.
6. I have a few phrases I use all the time, including:
• The filthy rich and their price-gouging corporations
• Doddering old criminal
• MAGA SCOTUS
• Billionaire media and their hired hacks
I also try to use words and phrases current on the site. Sane-washing is a good current example.
7. Family. I’m lucky that my extended family is fairly normal politically. My dad was always conservative, but in his old age he became besotted by Fox News. It was miserable. I don’t have much to go on, but maybe the following will help.
Don’t respond immediately. Wait until the initial response dies out, and then wait some more.
There may be a specific reason for the anger. We have no way to figure that out for strangers on social media, but we can at least try with family. Then maybe you can work with that in a later interaction, away from the immediate contact. At least maybe you can avoid triggering something unpleasant.
Post a lot of family pics, pet videos and non-political funny stuff. It’s harder to be angry with people who make us laugh. If they go off the hook, respond later, much later, with a funny, or a link to a sports thing or anything but a reply. Life’s too short to be angry with family.
Finally, if you do respond, do so with a question: Where did you hear that? Do you have a link? Why do you think that? Could you explain?
I’m pretty sure the actual facts and your links won’t help matters, but I have to believe that getting people to say things directly, to type them out, to try to justify them, will help in the long run.
This isn’t a game for everyone. But I think it’s important to push back as best we can. We can’t let the creeps ruin everything. Do you have ideas? Comments are open!
UPDATE: There are a number of accounts that hang around accounts you might like, such as Democratic politicians. Here’s a good example: Paul A. Szypula 
, @Bubblebathgirl. This person spends hours posting garbage tweets, which draw lots of response. The account does not engage, and any time you spend there is wasted. Do not engage. If you feel like it: reply with “Do not engage with this troll”.
This may be somewhat OT, but it’s a question I’ve been wondering about:
Why are the democrats so terrible at explaining things?
Take immigration, for example. The republicans keep shouting that Biden and Harris want open borders, and let millions in, and this is why why have an immigration crisis. This is all B.S., of course. A blatant lie. But the democrats do nothing to dispel it and to present a different (an fact-based) narrative. Harris talked about Trump blocking the border-security law in congress, but this is not enough to understand why we have a crisis.
I had to make an effort to dig and find answers. There is nothing about it in mainstream media, or in most democrat-affiliated publications. People don’t know how the crisis in South America and especially Venezuela caused people to escape the horrors there, while risking their life traveling to the US border. They don’t understand that this current wave of border crossing is very different than anything we’ve seen before, because most of the refugees are families with young children. They don’t know that border security is just as effective as it ever been. that Biden actually made it harder to ask for asylum, that most people who cross the border let themselves be found intentionally so they could ask for asylum, that the US deports those who don’t qualify for asylum, and that Biden was expending the program for quick deportation. That we don’t have enough immigration judges and USCIS officers to handle the situation, and that we can’t keep families with pending refugee application in immigrant camps because court ruled those places are unsuitable for children, so the government have to release them to adhere to court order.
We don’t know all of this, because no one bothers to tell it to people.
This is true on many topics, and part of it is because the lies on the right are so pervasive and entrenched that it is impossible to counter or dislodge them. I apologize that I’m not going to try to capture all the layers of those lies.
But a simple response – like to note the relative effectiveness of the Obama/Biden/Harris border policies – leaves them politically vulnerable on the left.
For citizens on the left, they often don’t seem to recognize how much of the problems are due to a dysfunctional congress, or choices that were made long ago that congress prefers to continue (our immigration laws don’t value children or families, for example.) Too much talk also opens immigrants/immigrant groups to discrimination, exploitation and other harm (including losing jobs they prefer to keep).
From a WP article published in early 2019 (well worth the whole read):
“… the lies on the right are so pervasive and entrenched that it is impossible to counter or dislodge them.”
One approach is to target someone more likely (one can hope) to feel shame: J.D.Vance, as a Yale Law School graduate knows that:
— “murder” (the killing of another with malice aforethought), must not be used to describe the death of someone in a traffic accident (a term he used in the death of the child riding the school bus). Doing so is unethical.
— to say “Communicable diseases like HIV and TB have skyrocketed in this small Ohio town”, presupposes a verifiable and easily accessible public health data-point (one which I could not find). He is duty-bound to cite the evidence for this assertion. An attorney knows this.
(Ed, TY for referencing the article on pseudoembryology. As is true with difficult subjects (and in this case, with the subject of abortion), sometimes the best place to draw a line is somewhere in the middle. In this case, for me, it was all about the EEG.)
I don’t understand it either. I think it’s a very long-standing mind-set, and one that I loathe. One reason Harris and Walz are flying high is that they are taking the fight directly at that doddering old criminal and his shocking running buddy, and, of course, trouncing those weaklings.
I hope it continues when they take office. Walz should be the cheerleader in chief for the results we all want to see. He’s good at it, and seems to enjoy doing it. Also, Pete Buttigieg, who is really good at it.
My assumption, which is perhaps too cynical, is that for many on the right, “immigrants” is simply a barely-disguised synonym for “brown”. For such people, reasonable explanations are irrelevant, and must be avoided, because to acknowledge the logic would expose the underlying bias. They know that overt racism is unacceptable – see MTG’s reaction to Laura Loomer! – but they believe that opposition to immigration can be justified in ways that allow them to deny the underlying feelings.
I’m glad you have a social media strategy, and I appreciate you sharing it. Let me respectfully suggest, however, that you are wasting your precious time. My approach is simple – I have no presence on or visibility to social media. I like to think my approach is good for my mental health.
Hopefully this won’t negatively affect your mental health, but I’m pretty sure EW is social media.
Accurate comment on social media platform is accurate.
This blog site is media with a social interaction component.
the Fediverse is the way….
Nice distinction, thank you.
Yes, Rayne. But when you shop for something, quality matters, so do you go bricks and mortar where you can handle merchandise, or use Amazon? It depends on what you are after, how much time it’s worth. EW makes me think, and there is enough diversity to a thread that I see it as worth my time to read. And a basic uniformity that I understand. OT a bit, Jack Dorsey after selling X to Elon has reinvested into crypto – https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/business/jack-dorsey-bitcoin-web3-vc.html — https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/inside-spiral-jack-dorseys-bitcoin-company – so is he into whatever for the money, for ego, to enjoy the ride? After selling, if you know, does Dorsey tweet?
It’s a blog with a moderated comment feature. So far as I know, not just anyone can post, I don’t have a “feed” or “alerts,” and nobody’s harvesting my data.
It’s still social media, PJ. It’s just not a microblog like Bluesky/Threads/dead bird app/Mastodon.
WordPress blogs are federated and can be shared in other federated platforms with RSS feeds. Replies in federated platforms to posts shared in federated platforms can spawn notifications.
The difference, though, is that this WordPress blog’s posts can be shared socially while the comments here remain unshared. I don’t see that changing given the options already available in other federated platforms.
There’s a lot of canned bot messaging too which is disappointing and monotonous – it’s my feeling it’s better to not reply to those or who knows the potential rabbit holes.
Fanning the flames. And rather than trying to detect and remove them, seems xitter either rolls it’s own or knows who to call to make it worse.
This is a great subject to bring up, thank you!
Thank you for this post, Ed.
Very helpful post. Thank you, Ed.
I read Twitter often, but never post. I don’t need the aggravation. But I too have found lists helpful. One is a curated list of devoted Trump fans. I find it interesting to monitor their thinking. I checked it often during the debate., where their complaints about the moderators reflected they could tell it was not going well.
I have an old friend from high school (I am now 70) who is a Trumper, convinced he had won the 2020 election. The Trump list helps me anticipate or understand him when we talk, which we do a few times a week, as he lives alone and doesn’t interact much with others. We are well aware of our political differences, but have never let them get in the way, given our long history. I try to nudge him, slowly and carefully, in Ed’s manner – questions, or occasional clarifications. He and I live in a blue state, so I do not feel the election turns on our conversations.
As it happened, he and I had spoken the morning of the debate, and in that chat I had exposed him to reporting that neither Aurora, CO nor Springfield OH (which he had told me about so I had checked on) were true. Which surprised him. That Trump then went all-in on Springfield in the debate was amazing.
I haven’t heard from my friend since the debate. I am very curious as to how our next conversation will go. Usually when Trump takes a hit it takes a while for my old friend to call me, and I always let him define what that time period should be.
I bookmark the people I want to read on the bird hellsite. I don’t use the feed. I block a lot of people.
“We can’t let the creeps ruin everything.”
Thank you, Ed Walker. Truer words have never been spoken.
Mastodon is such a refreshing place.
I’ll so glad on the day we can sweep all those pus people back under the crawl space and back to AM radio and move on.
Similarly, my go-to in Overwatch when someone was tilting was “You know what, you’re right. It’s not fair and it sucks. You should totally ragequit.” Now if you can nullify the payoff for these people acting out then by all means, have fun making them squirm. Otherwise it’s not worth it imo.
With people you have actual relationships with, the questioning approach really is the best way to go to avoid things becoming adversarial. If you can open a door for somebody there’s a chance they may step through.
Lists sound very useful but I tend to be very choosy about who I follow and I will relentlessly mute retweets on topics I’m uninterested in, so my Following tab is pretty well controlled overall. Though I probably don’t have as many interesting and useful people I hear from as I might if I made more of an effort to curate things.
I think this article from The Guardian on 9/12/2024 is interesting on how AI was used in an experiment to reduce belief in conspiracies. Seems like an appropriate tangent to your post, Mr. Walker.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/sep/12/ai-can-change-belief-in-conspiracy-theories-study-finds
Thank you for sharing, this is a fascinating approach. I’ve long been wondering if there’s any kind of discourse/rhetorical system we can adopt as a whole to chip away at the right-wing delusional bubble, even if it’s to just start them down the path of questioning. It often feels as if the cognitive dissonance knots they’ve tied themselves up in to protect their psyche is nigh impenetrable so any indication it can be lowered is encouraging.
Trying to think how to more broadly apply this, though, I wonder if it’s possible to utilize these techniques ad hoc on social media the way Ed is suggesting. By using AI to help select a counterargument? Or was it the fact that the study participants knew they were talking to an AI that made them more willing to listen to its arguments in the first place?
“My stock response to these ignorant people is: Killing babies is a crime. If you know of such a crime and don’t report it you are an accessory and are criminally liable.”
With the standard IANAL caveat, failure to report actual knowledge of a serious crime to an appropriate authority is not being ‘an accessory’ but does raise criminal liability through misprision of a felony.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/4
Three quick thoughts on Bluesky:
1. It’s unambiguously the closest thing to Twitter Original Recipe (as opposed to eXtra Crispy).
2. In your first week, you’ll find it’s not nearly as close as you would like.
3.But by your second or third month — should you stick around — you’ll see that its closing velocity is much greater than you had first presumed.
No algo. Good Blocking framework. Nice tools like Labelers and Starter Pack follow lists. Actively engaged devs on the platform. Alas, no Bookmarks as yet, but still. And of course Marcy is there.
What you said about family is pretty much how republican hubs & I have survived trump. Once in a while one of us gets so fed up with the current news that we’ll rant, then it gets hard to deal but we usually avoid discussing politics & give civility a good try. It isn’t impossible just difficult at times. And even though he complains he will still go the extra mile & surprise me. I do the same. Love wins in the end.
I follow links elsewhere that cite Twitter (x is shorter to type). Otherwise it is without me. Can I, using X, find if Harris, when elected, will repeal the Trump tax cut or try, or is her policy business as usual? I cannot find it anywhere else, but can I find it on X?
Will X tell me where Harris is headed on healthcare? In even a semi-reliable way? It is a thing I wonder about. Is X providing a good return for your time?
Ed, you seem smart, what’s the payoff for using X, for you, as opposed to querying stuff in your browser? I understand many good people use it, but does it do more than reinforce things you already believe, or show you other ways to argue why opposite views are defective? Has it affected you beliefs of who you’re voting for, Trump or Harris, or has it reinforced and set the hook to where you’re already going?
I use youtube, and when I search for a video favoring Trump all the recommender stuff on the right seems aligned with the general mood of the item being watched. A pro-Trump video, they recommend more. A pro Biden video, they recommend more. Is X like that? A writer I respect has a blog, and I follow it. It gets few hits. He posts something short on X, it gets more eyeballs. Is it better?
I started reading Xitter for the laughs. I stay because a bunch of lawyers and law profs are there, and I write and think a lot about legal matters. Same for several other areas. None of the journal articles or niche stuff I like is picked up in the legacy media.
Lately I’ve been fiddling with some of the nut case stuff, whence this post. It started with Qrazy stuff and weirdo Covid stuff, and I gradually branched out to where I am now.
As an example, I follow a Public Defender. It’s been very enlightening, not just about her cases, but about what it’s like to do this work. Also, she first alerted me to how much Kamala Harris’ body and face in the debate owed to Harris’ background in prosecution, specifically the cadence of her speech.
A much quicker, more efficient way to research Harris’s policy positions is just to read the campaign website:
https://kamalaharris.com/issues/
With the added bonus of not having to read through any potential journalistic bias or misreporting.
So does anyone have thoughts about whether GOTV or social media will contribute more to getting Harris elected in November?
Calls, door knocking, the stuff we traditionally associate with GOTV is going to be significantly more impactful. I think it’s useful to think of communication mediums in terms of their “cognitive bandwidth”.
E-mails and text messages are the most “narrowband” of all channels. They are asynchronous, lacking real-time interaction. Visual components are either missing or static. Chat is closer to real-time but lacks the same richness as e-mail/SMS.
Voice-only communication is a real-time experience with all the vocal cues that come from tone, inflection, and pacing. It “hits different”. When someone comes an knocks on your door, you are at maximum cognitive engagement. Facial expressions, body language, the full weight of social mores in a shared physical space, and a presence quite literally at the threshold of your interior life.
If we’re teaching someone we’re engaging with while also motivating them to act, a single door-knock is better than a dozen posts. The mass media/social media strategy is far more pervasive and labor efficient of course and still has to be part of the overall strategy.
I think the lack of investment from the Trump campaign in recruiting and fieldwork is going to be a substantial problem for them, at least wrt the normal, legitimate parts of the electoral process.
Interesting and quite intelligent. How do you feel about the role of online debate in affecting the votes of undecided third parties?
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been talking to people online in one form or another since the late 80s, so I have some bias here, but of course I do think it’s possible to move people through online discussions. If anything, the power of online discourse has helped put us here via online radicalization.
The thing that I think has to be kept in mind is that it’s functionally impossible to reverse someone’s opinion simply through dialog, even in-person dialog. It’s as big of a waste of time as trying to eliminate bad habits through “willpower.” There is no deleting people’s beliefs, there is only overwriting them in the long-term, or in the short term creating new relationships between their existing beliefs and new information.
That’s why radicalizing the young is so effective, because they still have a lot of unformed space in their perspectives that are hungry for structure. So as far as debate goes, I think if you’re going to get any results, you need to ask a lot of questions and give your dialog partner space to breathe so they feel safe and are more willing to accept new information with their walls down. It’s also an area where I think it’s right to point around to all the lawyers around here and note that they do a bunch of homework before getting into arguments with people, and it benefits us to try and be really informed on the topics we try to engage on.