140 Character Shackles
Blog Post
If it is true that ‘brevity is the soul of wit’, then why is twitter a soulless husk without a clue? The core of the website, now officially called X after it was purchased by Elon Musk, was its 140 character limit for each post. In the ancient internet of rambling facebook posts, humiliating wordpress blogs, and vbulletin forums for every community under the sun, twitter’s concept was actually unique. We couldn’t know in the early 2000s that twitter would morph the way we communicate, and that we would find ourselves in 140 character shackles.
Now posts on twitter aren’t about what is true, or even what brings the most joy to the platform, but what will get the most people to respond in the shortest amount of time. This isn’t only true of twitter, but the site is emblematic of this problem. A common saying online was, ‘the quickest way to learn the truth on social media is to be confidently incorrect’. If I post that Mario first appeared in a game in 1987, people would trip over themselves to correct me, and probably call me an idiot.
On twitter and other platforms where posters are paid based on ‘engagement’, that is replies and reposts, being aggressively wrong is more lucrative than being correct. Whole careers have been built on this, and ‘engagement’ has commandeered youtube and swathes of the podcast space. But in my opinion it is most nefarious on twitter, where misinformation and hate speech are posted, protected by the site’s staff and owner, reposted by other engagement farming accounts, and replied to by droves of other engagement farmers. As John Oliver spoke about in his February 22nd, 2026 segment of Last Week Tonight on Twitter, verified blue checkmark posters can make a couple thousand dollars every two weeks from engagement. This doesn’t seem like much for all the effort, if you live in North America. In countries where that money goes further, like India or Africa, enraging people on twitter could be a lifestyle. So being wrong is expedient, alluring, and lucrative, making the whole site a den of lies and hate.
But that isn’t what scares me the most. I’m unnerved by the effect on language, on how we communicate across social media. There is an infamous tweet to the effect of ‘You can say “I like pancakes” and somebody will say “So you hate waffles?”’ It isn’t just hilarious, it is profound. In our attempt to be succinct to fit the twitter text box, a longer and thought out message may be boiled down to ‘I like pancakes’, which the previously mentioned engagement farmers can easily counter with bait.
The tweets that get the most motion are those with overblown and emotionally charged messages, so why keep your ideas tight or specific? Soon every message you send is about how you hate this, hate that, this person should just die, that product should go away forever! No need to articulate why, maybe we will get to it in the replies, maybe someone will learn the truth if they dig 10 comments deep into the war you’ve started with other posters. Every person talks ‘past’ each other, their message never written for the human they are replying to but to dunk on them for some imagined audience. No one changes their mind because there is no room for a convincing argument, no one takes advice because who do you trust among a million anonymous people who are all ‘verified’ because they opened their wallet, no one uses their kindest voice because the first assumption is the person on the screen is either a bot, a bigot, or bait. It didn’t used to be like this, it never had to be like this!
I have to remind myself that this is someone’s plan, the internet is this way intentionally. My old world view hid behind the adage Hanlon’s Razor, ‘Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.’ Similarly I had my own belief, ‘Do not attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by greed.’ Both are failing me, because there is a growing body of proof that malicious people really are conspiring to make everything worse. Powerful and wealthy people like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and more people than I can name here, continue to corrupt our means to communicate. I know this part sounds like paranoid rambling, but you can search up news for yourself about the purchasing and downsizing of social media and news platforms. Ask yourself why your phone is constantly getting spam calls, why websites are filled with disturbing ads, why options are vanishing from services you’ve used for decades.
We use terms like ‘enshittification’, cryptofascists, chuds, to categorize and make us feel better about what is happening around us. But at the end of the day, identifying an enemy is only the first step to defending yourself, or going on the attack. How does Elon Musk benefit from twitter becoming a cesspool? No, further than that, how does he benefit from twitter condensing and corrupting the way we communicate with each other?
The rich and powerful would love nothing more than for us to spend our free time screaming at each other instead of taking any action. Our social urge to post a cathartic takedown tweet at some foreign user cosplaying as an American for less than minimum wage is priceless to a wealthy mogul. It is a new opium, we think seeing ridiculous social media interactions is us watching monkeys fighting in a cage, but our eyes are turned away from the glass that borders our own enclosure. Behind it they watch, and know that we their pets are content with our petty enrichment. Twitter, youtube, facebook, instagram, tiktok, reddit, it doesn’t matter which form it takes. We are being poisoned, and twitter’s transformation into a 140 character hellscape was the beginning of the end. I don’t know if there is any saving us now, people have lost the drive to speak clearly, we bait for engagement even when there is no profit incentive. Our fury and spite is purely performative, we dance for 0 viewers.