Since its inception in 2009, the tweet as a form of expression has repeatedly proven that there are no limits to what can be unleashed in 140 characters. Just last month, the President of the United States managed to threaten the total nuclear annihilation of another country in one tweet. If he had the 280 characters that Twitter now proposes, it would probably be apocalypse now.
It is not just Donald Trump with his 3 a.m. tweet frenzies. For many world leaders, Twitter is now the de facto medium for political posturing. In India, the Narendra Modi government’s digitisation drive actually began with the shifting of pretty much all people-government communications to Twitter. It bypassed the filters of the press, the much-reviled ‘MSM’. Our letters-to-the-editor class is now a tweet-to-the-minister class, compressing everything from garbage pile-ups to national security questions within the character count. The addition of 140 characters should come as a relief, since they can now start with the preferred ‘Respected Sir/Madam’. We should also appreciate the fact that it is a non-partisan addition since ‘anti-national’, ‘Congi’, ‘commie’, and ‘libtard’ can all fit into one tweet now, as can ‘demonetisation’, ‘GST’, ‘petrol price’, and ‘feku’.
On the downside, all those blonde Caucasian women with eerily similar profiles will now have to spend more time typing out remarkably similar tweets about the achievements of the BJP. A moment of silence here also for the PR executives and brand managers who have to come up with several more “engaging” hashtags.
More words is not more nuance
On Twitter, brevity, the soul of wit, is also the forte of the racist and the bigot. These are mindsets that thrive in the absence of nuance, and social media, which rewards controversy with visibility, is the perfect setting for their growth. It would be simplistic to assume that increasing the character count of a tweet will make way for nuance. It will only feed into the established rules of the game on the platform. The armchair analyst who foresees doom among the Rohingya refugees will only add an “also…” if given more space, not a “however…”
But the major worry here is different. Facebook once said there are 1,500 stories that they can potentially show a user when she logs in, prioritising them algorithmically to show what could be most interesting first. That is a nearly endless stream of content they can throw up to retain you on their platform. Twitter is also similarly content-heavy, with nearly 8,000 tweets per second. As fake news and viral content generators mushroom, the key issue online now is the profligacy of content. Moderation and curation are urgent requirement in the realm of digital news, rather than generating more content. As content saturates, chances are high that users will limit themselves to smaller and smaller niches, limiting their world view. Twitter and Facebook need to spend more time and thought on limiting the quantity of content getting onto their platforms and improving the quality.
