Twitter’s Certainty Problem
Definitiveness is one of Twitter’s core characteristics. Should it be?
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Twitter is a game played on certainty, where nuance goes to die. The tweets with absolutist statements tend to collect the most retweets, no matter how loose their relationship with reality. And since retweets are the Twitter game’s points — used for reach, influence, and earning potential — people tend to be as definitive as possible on the service, even under the most uncertain of circumstances.
Because Twitter rewards taking a stance, doing so quickly, and lining up with tribal sympathies, it encourages people to share news with definitive framing, even before events conclude. This extends beyond news, to people too. Twitter users regularly judge each other with absolutism, distilling multi-dimensional humans into caricatures based on a single tweet, thread, or video. No matter the cost of being wrong about someone’s character or intent, to win on Twitter is to be sure about them.
Twitter’s certainty problem can be amusing at times, such as when a sizable portion of the service’s 200 million daily users become ‘experts’ on the topic of the day, like meme stocks…
