“If they don’t distinguish between Muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between whites and racists.” This is how the new Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tweeted 11 years ago. But the Internet, as we know, does not forget. And after the news of the departure of the founder Jack Dorsey, the old tweet went viral, especially in the United States, for the alleged racism towards whites expressed by the former AT&T engineer.
Story of an ignored tweet that goes viral
The tweet had gone virtually unnoticed at the time of its publication. In a few hours he received thousands of retweets and about 10,000 citations, only to be picked up by a series of conservative newspapers, first of all the US version of the Daily Mail. In short, Agrawal stole the show right away. Probably, though, not for the reasons he would have liked.
Upon careful analysis of the facts, the tweet turns out to be a quote from actor Aasif Mandvi, who had uttered that sentence in an episode of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (the video is still available online). Agrawal himself, in one of the replies to the 2010 tweet, later deleted, explained the nature of the quote.
Twitter and the collapse of contexts
This is certainly a weightless controversy, destined to deflate within a few hours. But it is ironic that it is the person destined to lead Twitter who suffers the consequences of a tweet. In particular, Parag Agrawal was the victim of what is generally called the collapse of contexts.
When we are online, we continually relate to a series of content that scrolls across our screen. Content on different topics, from different sources, from different sensitivities and attitudes. Especially on Twitter, this dynamic is amplified by the Trending Topic column, which puts us in front of topics and discussions that, in most cases, come from users we have never had to deal with.
What happens when a piece of content breaks through the barrier of its followers and ends up in Trending Topics? Contexts collapse. A harmless tweet, perhaps written by commenting on a TV show, as in the case of Agrabal, ends up in the hands of a very large number of people, who interpret it in a different way from the original one. That single piece of content becomes something autonomous, independent of the will of the person who posted it.
In a nice article in his Galaxy Brain newsletter, US journalist Charlie Warzel talks about “Twitter’s Main Character”, the daily ritual according to which a user – no matter if famous or not – ends up in the center of attention on Twitter for a tweet. that some find problematic.
According to Warzel, it would be precisely the functioning of Twitter that favors the collapse of contexts. The Trending Topic algorithm is in fact programmed to identify the discussions that most involve users, in terms of interactions and tweet views. In this way, when that discussion, perhaps just started, is placed in the right column, it ends up involving even more people. In other words, it ends up taking the discussion – or the tweet, as in the case of Agrawal – further and further away from its original context.
Social network
Jack Dorsey leaves Twitter, in his place Parag Agrawal
by Emanuele Capone
The consequences of the algorithm
Among the legacies that Jack Dorsey leaves to Twitter and Silicon Valley is the interest and important commitment in internal research, especially on algorithm and artificial intelligence. The META team – no, Zuckerberg has nothing to do with it, it stands for ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability – has been working for some months on a series of important investigations on this issue. The latest public release involved the discovery that Twitter’s algorithm favors content from right-wing sources and accounts for no apparent reason.
What if the next work of the META team was precisely on the Trending Topic algorithm?
Francesco Marino has a digital culture project on Instagram called Pills of the Future Present.
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