As everybody on Twitter is convinced their favourite hellsite is dying and the exodus to alternatives is increasing, here’s a reminder of something that can only happen on twitter: having a meltdown because somebody tweeted about cooking chili for her neighbours. That’s not something that could’ve happened on Mastodon! Or Facebook. Or Instagram. Or any other social media site, really. I’m sure there are users on other social media websites who take personal offence to some harmless act somebody else is writing about, but only Twitter can blow it up so efficiently. On Mastodon? It would’ve never left its home instance.
It all started with someboy tweeting that her new neighbours were a bunch of college kids and wanting to feed them by cooking them a chilli. Which is, well, a fairly ordinary thing to do for your neighbours? A nice little gesture to introduce yourself and maybe get to know your new neighbours better. My own upstairs neighbours, who moved in during the pandemic have done this a few times for me and tasty it was too. In return it became a lot easier to ignore the increased noise from above (the last tenant was an elderly woman who you’d never hear unless her grandchildren visited). My next door neighbour looks after my cat when I’m on holiday, while I accept postal packages for most of my neighbours since I work from home most of the week. Just those little things you do for each other.
Only on Twitter can this incredibly normal thing be made into something weird and problematic. First there was the gender critical (sic) brigade harassing her, partially because of pre-existing beef for her being too much of a trans ally. They went with their normal existential sexism: “A mAn WoUlD nEvEr Do ThIs” and “YoU’rE tRaInInG mEn To Be HeLpLeSs” and “DoN’t CoDdLe MaLeS”. That sort of thing is to be expected if you’re a reasonably well known Twitterer and you’ve spoken out against TERFs. But the weirdo who responded to this act of kindness by imagining it was them receiving it and then cataloging all the ways in which it was inappropriate for them, that was special.
Again, there seems to be a pre-existing grudge at play here: why else get so offended at a stranger offering kindness? Why make it this personal? Why spent this many tweets on it? It’s not just that this person wouldn’t have done this, or not have liked having been the recipient of this, it’s the way in which they go out of their way to make their dislike into a moral issue. It’s not just that this gift is unwelcome; it’s ableist. It’s not just that this maybe a bit too a noisy a neighbour, no, she’s a white saviour. It’s not that she made this food unprompted, it’s that she didn’t ask for consent. Everything about it needs to be morally wrong. So they go into way too much detail about their own personal situation and the way their own disabilities means that this gesture would’ve been ableist and the wrong kind of help, without even noticing they contradict themselves in the process. If you’re too tired and incapable of cooking because of OCD that you need to order take out, why exactly is having a free meal brought by a neighbour instead a problem again? Why indeed should the original poster have catered for your own personal situation when that was completely irrelevant to what she was doing for her actual neighbours?
There’s a real problem with this kind of social justice language abuse by crybullies. Here it just comes over as laughable and pathetic, but in the real world we’ve seen it used by transphobes (PrOtEcT wOmEn) to invent situations in which it’s morally justified to harass and attack an already vulnerable minority. So it’s good to see it slapped down hard in this case. What lends it power is the structure and design of Twitter: it’s easy for a tweet from a relativily ‘famous’ poster to escape their own circle through quote tweeting and retweeting to new audiences. Unlike almost every other social website, Twitter offers the illusion of privacy while in reality everybody is shouting to everybody else in the same town square. So a tweet written with a certain audience in mind can easily be picked up and misunderstood by other audiences unfamiliar with the context, especially when malicious actors retweet them. On a site like Mastodon, deliberately designed to slow down this process this would be far harder to do.
The downside being of course that it’s also harder for benign content to find new audiences. One of the worst things on Twitter, that uncontrollable spread of (mis)information, is also its best. So many new things and people I’ve found because they got retweeted into my timeline. More importantly, this process was and is incredibly important in getting (underrepresented) communities to find each other and grow.
Quote tweeting, retweeting and hash tags makes it easier for isolated members of such a community to find each other and for groups of like-minded people to ‘advertise’ their existence. It’s this that has made Twitter, more than any other social medium, so important for marginalised groups and peoples. That’s why I’m a bit skeptical of Mastodon’s refusal to implement quote tweeting and other technical solutions against bullying and bigotry.
(And of course everything about chiligate here is hilarious and I think Mastodon on the whole is too po-faced to enjoy this sort of content.)
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