the death of good faith

on social media and the discourse of distraction

There was one point, I’m sure, when Twitter was a good thing. Not at the start, at least not for me; I’m a late adopter of such things as this. If anything, I’m tech-sceptical; I won’t even update my operating system until everyone else has had six months to figure out what’s wrong with it. But I eventually did get on board, and it felt for a while like something decent, a space where those outside the mainstream got to have a voice. Somewhere you could follow people’s work and comments, and find like-minded people. Maybe even a place you could organise. I made friends on it. I liked it. I spent way too much time on it.

But something happened. I’m not sure when, and I’m not exactly sure that it was one thing at all. But I can pinpoint the exact day when I stopped and thought: wait, this is kind of messed up.

It was one of those tweets from a total stranger, the type you never used to see before the algorithm changed. I won’t be on here much for the next while, this tweet said, because my husband has just been in a serious car crash. I’m on the way to the hospital. So I won’t be posting here for a while.

In the grand scheme of things posted on Twitter, this is pretty innocuous. For most people, I’m sure, it would elicit sympathy and little else. But it plunged me into a weird ennui: Your husband might die, and you’re posting on Twitter? I thought. The first thing you could thing of was to post it online?

Of course, this person was not just posting on social media. I’m sure she was freaked out, and scared, and needed an outlet. But it was the first time I understood how this digital space had overwhelmed its borders with real life, becoming not just a triviality but something to be accountable to. Once you see these kinds of posts, you can’t unsee them. We’ve just turned off my father’s life support. I got stabbed ten minutes ago. My wife left me last night, and I don’t think I can take it. I had my first drink in ten years, then I had ten more. All these people in the worst moments of their life, turning not to their friends, or professionals, or the emergency services, but to the grand, sprawling darkness of the internet, where if they were lucky they might find the hollow support of strangers, and if they were unlucky they’d be mocked, made viral, embarrassed and shamed.

And still I stayed on it, because I was conditioned to, by then. My industry operates heavily on Twitter, and you feel you need to keep up with who’s winning prizes and retweet everyone’s book releases and keep up to date with who has beef and who has accused so-and-so of this or that and which writer has said a stupid thing that derails their whole life. But whereas before I learned things, and laughed at things, and found bits of information I later researched in more detail, now it seemed to take a turn towards the reactionary, and it operated not on comedy bits or interesting, previously unheard voices, but an endless cycle of bitterness, anger and false information. Nothing could happen without everyone feeling they had to comment. You were supposed to take a position on everything that happened, within several seconds of it happening, regardless of how little you knew of the real goings on. You were supposed to support something or hate it, and decide in an instant. One day I turned to my partner, like someone who has just come out of a trance, and said: Why am I supposed to care what all these people think? Why am I supposed to listen to hundreds of strangers all day every day?

I deleted the app off my phone, and stopped myself giving in to the compulsion to tweet, reserving it mostly for promotion of work or retweeting things related to Palestine. I observed, and stayed more quiet, and noticed that often, the loudest voices were not being honest, or they were misrepresenting something I knew had actually gone very differently. So much of the content seemed to be pure reaction, anger thrown in all the wrong places, people raging at other people for not behaving exactly as they had behaved; the ‘political’ content seemed to be not about making change but about forcing other people to do exactly what you’d decided they should do, tweet exactly as you’d decided they should tweet, a constant and endless bickering about things that, in the grand scheme, made zero difference at all. A few months ago, I realised I was becoming overwhelmed with anxiety every single time I logged on to the site, knowing that I would see people constantly tearing down other people, throwing accusations around, lashing out in deep despair and aiming their very real anger at whoever was closest—a discourse that did nothing but create division, while the real evils lay completely untouched. It would affect me all day; I would lose sleep over it, these people I knew at each other’s throats, no grace given, only ever the worst assumptions made about what someone might think or mean. I signed out of my account, and didn’t go on for a week, and I came back to the world. I read books on the topics I was interested in. I swam, and did yoga, and checked out of the discourse. I slept better. I wrote more, started drawing and painting. I had lazy breakfasts with my partner in the mornings, reading magazines and talking about books and doing the crossword. And I breathed, and had hard conversations in real life, and joined direct action groups, and joined real actions, and I didn’t miss it really at all.

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There’s a concept in philosophy that you’ll have heard of: bad faith. Everyone these days uses it to denote a lack of sincerity in online discourse—where being in ‘bad faith’ means you’re really just trolling—but it comes from a more specific place, and has a more specific meaning.

Mauvaise foi (bad faith) is an Existentialist concept that means to act inauthentically—that is, to deny your own free will, and reject the project of creating your own values by giving in to the comfort of social conformity. It is to have your identity defined from outwith yourself; to slip into a pre-determined way of being. To refuse yourself as a being-for-itself. It relates heavily to the concept of self-deception and to Nietzsche’s term ressentiment, which means to assign blame to someone for your own frustrations and rage; to focus your hostility on someone you have decided is at fault. To scapegoat.

The opposite, then—good faith—means to act in an authentic manner: to approach every concept, idea or challenge with the knowledge that you, alone, can decide what you believe is right or wrong. That in the face of difficult questions, you cannot just adhere thoughtlessly to what someone else does or says, but have to grapple with the issue for yourself, in full knowledge that you are both totally free and totally responsible: open to decide whatever you will, but accountable for the consequences of whatever you choose.

But there’s another part of this, in Existentialism, and it concerns the Other. In order to be authentic, and free—to live in good faith—you have to act in a way that accepts and creates the conditions for someone else’s freedom. To act in good faith is not just to recognise that you have the freedom to act, but to recognise that everyone else has that freedom too. That other people, too, are grappling with the same anguish and abandonment and despair (these are the states we go through on the road to authenticity, according to Sartre) as you. That we all live in the same world and are contending with the same things.

None of us really act in this kind of ‘good faith’ on Twitter—these days, at least. The algorithm makes us act differently. Twitter is a reaction machine, drawing out our most keenly felt emotions and packing them for public consumption. We retweet things, and weigh in on the discourse, and immediately conjure up opinions on things we haven’t done a single second of real research into—or things we couldn’t possibility do research into, because they are interpersonal conflicts made public, where objective facts will always be hard to come by. We sit there watching, waiting for a fight. When something blows up, we instantly pick a side, retweet, comment snidely, fan the flames. We don’t consider the responsibility we have in sharing or saying these things, and even if we did, we would not back down, because when we have done something publicly, it cannot be taken back. When we find ourselves in conflict, we constantly represent our adversaries as being dishonest; we deny everything they claim, misrepresent what they’ve said, remove from them the possibility of an internal struggle or material strain like we ones we have. We are real and they are not. Anything they say has to be taken in the worst possible understanding; anything we say must be taken as read. We can never be two equal people grappling with the same issue; you are evil, and I am good.

This might be manageable if there was an impermeable boundary between Twitter and the offline world; if this operative manner could be contained on the site. But there is not. The bad faith of social media reaches into the rest of the world. We have been trained to take every issue we have, every conflict that arises, to the murky waters of Twitter. We feel the immediate need to establish a narrative that puts us in a positive light and our rivals in a negative light, to refute the complexity of any matter under dispute. And this means that the possibility of good faith is altogether gone; you cannot do diplomacy with someone if they will take anything you say and put it out in public. You cannot speak freely to someone if they will misquote you to the world. The people who thrive in this online environment are people whose main goal is to claim a story, in defiance of facts, and hate mobs who go after minorities and those who support them. Those who refuse to get down in that mud with these people stay silent, and lose the publicity fight. We have trained ourselves out of normal human engagement. The algorithm, it seems, has won.

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But what about the politics? For many of us, Twitter has been a place to have our left-wing beliefs validated, in a society that has hewn to the right for longer than many of us have been alive. It’s where we finally could listen to marginalised voices, and it’s where those voices could organise. It’s part of how the socialist upswing of 2015-2019 happened (though the thousands of people knocking doors, and showing up to meetings, and the decades of local work by the MP in question are often forgotten). Most recently, it’s how we have all seen, directly, what has been happening to Gaza, to the people of Palestine, for nine months exactly.

For me, this is reason enough to keep an account, even if I will only check it once every couple of weeks, a brief look for news, to respond to messages or RT a friend. I also want to promote my work, don’t get me wrong; I’m a writer, at the end of it, and need to make a living—in a landscape that becomes harder to do so every single day. But I also want to see, with my own eyes, the videos that come out of Gaza. I want to listen to those voices that have no other platform. I want to share things that are important. But most of all, I want to not spend my life there, kidding myself that posting on Twitter constitutes a positive engagement with the world.

We need to look around us for the people who are really doing the work. I follow a few groups doing direct action on a number of issues; the only time these actions reach social media is when numbers are required to physically resist. The work of the people in those groups is real, and effective, and necessarily hidden. Everyone can make social media content about ‘actions’ they’ve done that actually posed no danger to power at all; those putting their necks on the line have to do it more quietly. On the most recent discourses, I have looked to the people I know who have done that work for many years; they are nowhere to be seen, on social media, because they know that there is nothing to be gained from engaging. I recently talked about my Twitter break with one of the most ‘active’ activists I know: she actually cheered.

This isn’t to say that speaking on a matter is fruitless. Counter-narratives are required, and public opinion does have to be shaped. We have seen the value of speaking out. But on Twitter and Instagram, over time, the medium overwhelms the message, and things happen that raise the question of whether or not these spaces are helpful. A few years ago, it was the posting of pointless black squares on Instagram to make ourselves feel like we had done something for Black lives, and a few weeks ago it was the sea of people—47 million—sharing an AI image with the words all eyes on Rafah, ostensibly encouraging people to keep their attention on the horrific Israeli attacks on the city in the last month. It took just a second to share it to your stories. But what does this actually constitute, in terms of doing something? A recent study in the Oxford University Press on the effectiveness of social media posting said this:

engaging in these forms of public support activates a desire to present the self in a positive light, and once this desire is satisfied the token act may not lead to increased support for the cause.

How many of those 47 million people took the time to look up what was happening in Rafah, or take any action—any at all—to materially change the situation? How many took five minutes to buy esims for Gazans, or demand action from their local MP? While 47 million people were sharing an AI generated image, a handful of individuals from Palestine Action cut the internet to an Edinburgh factory that supplies weapons to Israel. One of these required being on social media; the other did not.

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Last week my partner forwarded to me an Instagram post from ‘rogue scholar’ and writer Josh Briond, talking about his frustration with the limitations of online discourse, and online ‘activism’. A lot of what he said made sense to me, but one thing in particular: what if we are also just talking too goddamn much?

We are encouraged to talk, to comment endlessly, as if that itself is action. We are encouraged to see social media as the Place Where Things Happen, where groups are organised. But these platforms are the opposite. They are places where distraction occurs, where lines are drawn between people who, realistically, materially are on the same side. Sometimes, we land on ‘actions’ that not only don’t work, but also exclude and marginalise people further. A few weeks ago, I saw that Twitter uses had begun to make lists of authors and other artists who had not spoken about Palestine on their social media accounts. On the one hand I understand the compulsion behind this; the anger is at the silencing effect of the powers that be, the censorship of pro-Palestinian positions, the hypocrisy of institutions and individuals who organised for Ukraine endlessly but are notably silent now. But this too is an example of a lack of good faith. It completely erases the many legitimate (and intersectional) reasons that someone may not feel able to publicly speak on one issue or another: they and their families may be reliant on employment that requires their public silence, or on benefits payments that are already under threat; they might be in this country on visas that would be endangered by such statements; they might be caring for a sick parent, or a disabled family member, and might not live their lives online. For some people, their race or gender make it unsafe for them to step into the increasingly toxic social media world with political statements, because they are the ones most likely to be harassed and doxxed and hounded out of work and even physically attacked. They might lack the confidence to post about an issue, when this often invites an aggressive and obsessive questioning. I feel confident to speak on Palestine because I have been thinking and reading and listening about it for over a decade; I feel less confident to speak on the situation in Sudan because I know very little about its context or where to find solid, reliable, unbiased information. To find these outlets takes time and critical thinking, often reading a lot and challenging your own assumptions or ignorance. This is the actual work of being politically aware, of thinking radically; it is the prerequisite of taking action that is focused. And when people do go to conflict zones, to do the harrowing but necessary labour of witnessing and reporting on human rights abuses or war crimes, they are often required to remove any evidence of political support for the people under attack; in order to be allowed in to do the work, they have to appear, publicly at least, politically neutral.

The very design of Twitter leads you to think that the most politically active people are the ones tweeting most about politics. But this doesn’t follow at all; take a step back and you’ll see it’s actually the opposite. If you’re sitting on Twitter all day, RTing or posting or just constantly scrolling, you aren’t doing the very often boring and time consuming work of politics: going to meetings, speaking to peers, lobbying lawmakers, attending education or training sessions, physically supporting migrants or the elderly, taking minutes on endless council or organising meetings, translating information so it can be read by non English speakers. Maybe some people are doing both: if we’re realistic, we know the vast majority aren’t.

I don’t mean to say, by all this, that there is no benefit at all to online activism. For many people, it is the only space they have to organise, whether through disability, or location, or mental health issues, or simply lack of capacity. We all continue to learn about the situation in Gaza through the accounts of Palestinians, and this is necessary, given the state of our mass media. But we have become too quick to speak, to react, to get caught up in the medium itself. We have become too credulous about the point of these platforms now, forgetting how they have changed, and who they are run by, and for whose benefit. We have been trained, over the last decade, to see these corporate online spaces, owned by the worst type of right-leaning billionaire arseholes, as a radical digital commons. And perhaps once, they were. But as they seek to capitalise on nothing but rage, reaction and conflict they now structurally encourage disorganising styles of communication. They thrive on us arguing amongst ourselves about relatively trivial matters that have absolutely no impact on the greater structural issues and the powers that control them. The result is that being politically ‘active’ online so often seems to come down to who can use social media most effectively to turn the public on their enemy—or, too often, someone who is only actually an inch away from them, but who they have decided is their enemy. The discourse becomes the matter at hand, the real issue overwhelmed, the focus shifted—while the real culprits of systemic violence go untouched and completely unmentioned, destroying the world as we know it and creating more and more platforms on which we can bicker and fight and will ourselves away from true action. We all feel shit about it, and we can’t stop it, so it goes on and on, draining any hope or energy. Rather than taking our peers and turning them towards our cause, we now sever the links between us and undermine any possibility of a proper, broad and effective movement. The discourse is not only disruptive, but destructive too.

The algorithm, of course, is personalised; perhaps it is only mine that is so cursed. But I suspect, from talking to friends, that I am not alone in finding it awful. This thing that has fed us is now feeding off us. The thing that faciliated connection is now trapping us inside.

A few years ago, I left my house on a sunny late morning and joined several hundred other people in stopping a Home Office van from leaving with two of our neighbours who had been snatched from their homes in the early light. By the time the sun went down that day, the two men were free. Social media was alight with it, but the action was in using our physical bodies. We resisted, in the real world, and it worked. And for the first time in many years, I felt powerful, and hopeful.

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Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly relapsing into repose. ... There is no more action or decision in our day than there is perilous delight in swimming in shallow waters.

Kierkegaard, Two Ages: A Literary Review