an amazing thing almost happened on twitter. i say almost because the folks at twitter intervened before the amazing could take place. why they chose to take action is easily understood, but in so doing a rare opportunity was lost.
the facts are these:
this morning, RevRunWisdom (yes, that Rev Run), tweeted the phrase “Know God… Know Peace. No God.. No Peace!.”.
other twitter users began retweeting it, and others retweeted from them, and so on, making the phrase extremely common in the public tweet stream.
the twitter trending topics list is constructed automatically and, as far as i can tell, with only a small amount of filtering; one would assume various offensive bits of slang are in common use on the service, but they never appear in the trending topics. the constant retweeting of “Know God… Know Peace. No God.. No Peace!.” caused it, quite naturally, to appear in the trending topics. however, the automatic parsing into shorter chunks, appropriate for trending topics, resulted in two phrases showing up on the list: “No God” and “Know Peace”.
the appearance of the term “No God” in trending topics caused two new waves of tweets and retweets: religious people expressing confusion and, sometimes, outrage and non-religious people expressing delight. this is what folks in control theory call positive feedback. angrily tweeting about the presence of “No God” in trending topics only made it appear more frequently in the tweet stream, quickly driving it to the top of the list.
after several hours of this, with “No God” locked firmly in the top trending topics slot, and the volume of “No God” tweets rising, the folks at twitter stepped in. the trending topics list suddenly only showed “Know God”. the link presented actually went to a search that included both “No God” and “Know God”, but the offending term no longer appeared in trending topics. once again, i do not fault the folks at twitter for this choice, it makes sense in many ways for their business.
i am, however, disappointed. the “No God” incident was modern, american, civic debate in the purest form i’ve ever witnessed, with every action and reaction visible and documented. having misunderstood the reasons for a situation, a group of people lashed out in a manner that did nothing but serve to amplify the very situation angering them. their ignorance of the simple mechanics of trending topics and their direct, literal responsibility for its contents drove them to take exactly the wrong action.
i like to think the people angrily tweeting and retweeting “No God” would’ve learned within a few hours or days and changed their tactics, letting the topic drop, and so, disappear. even more optimistically, i like to think that would lead to thousands of ‘a-ha!’ moments as they came to understand not just this trap, but the hundreds of other, similar traps set for them all the time in their lives: at home, at work, at school, at church, by the media, by the government, by big corporations, by the nature of the world. i like to think “No God” would have resulted in a lot of people suddenly able to listen and think before lashing out. imagine it, if you can.
this was the amazing moment lost and i, for one, mourn it. one more thing i like to think, though, is that it is only the first, not the last, and eventually those lessons will be learned, changing our notions about debate and disagreement, and the world along with them.
