Twitter isn't healthy for _anyone_. Neither is the vast majority of social media. The way in which most sites currently structure interactions lends itself quite naturally to misinformation, extreme polarization, and resulting anxiety.
I've personally witnessed the effect on reasonably well educated adults in my life; I can only imagine how much worse it must be for those with less general experience and knowledge.
I've seen a lot of kids my age become Communists or Nazis due to internet-induced radicalization; I was rather close to becoming a radical leftist myself. Personally, I think it's harmless; they tend not to hold these views for a long time when tempered with the saner views of their peers and broader society. It's like the chicken pox - you get it once, become a bit nasty for a while, and then you're immune to further insanity.
It's when the person in question is mentally ill or socially isolated (i.e a NEET living in their mother's basement) that radicalization becomes harmful, because there's nothing to bring them back to the baseline. Marginal identities attract marginal people.
(I have a theory that online transgender-ism is spreading in exactly the same way - note the massive amount of trans people online who are also NEETs, weebs, and/or communists. But that's a story for another day.)
At least in your first paragraph, your experience is similar to my own (19 y/o here). There's a growing population of people who are in totally polarised buckets politically.
It makes sense that trans people would be left-leaning because people who aren't left-leaning tend (painting with broad brushstrokes) to be opposed to equal treatment for trans people. Similarly, trans people can often be quite socially isolated because it's difficult for them to integrate into a transphobic society. In the US, there are 26 states where it's perfectly legal to fire someone simply for being trans.
Beyond that, I think you are quite off base in comparing trans people to online Communist and neo-Nazi radicals. You are probably looking at a much narrower slice of the trans population than you think you are. Assuming that you don't actually have some kind of anti-trans agenda, I'd rethink how you're expressing whatever point you're trying to make here.
I agree with you on that last point - I'm talking largely about the trans people who are very online and very vocal about it (a self-selected demographic), not trans people in general.
Even so, there are uncomfortable undertones in comparing those people to neo-Nazis and the like. If you think that radical trans activists are in some meaningful way comparable to neo-Nazis and other violent thugs, or that they are mentally ill, then it may be you who has been taken in by online propaganda.
I guess it annoys me that you left this little ad-hominem in parentheses at the end of your original comment. If you have some kind of issue with trans people or trans rights, you should really just say what that is, rather than making these kinds of comparisons.
As someone not on Twitter, I do see an awful lot of good content on the platform. By not engaging with it directly I can usually skip out on or ignore the worst parts of it.
I'm a researcher and Twitter has been an enormous boon for my work; within my field, most 'big' researchers are active on Twitter, they know me now, I know them, I'm always up-to-date with the research (way easier than following 500 RSS feeds) and the 'trends' within my field. It's also the best avenue for discussing anything work-related, at least 3 international collaborations of mine have started this way.
I have a few thousand followers and I follow a few thousand people across different time-zones. Again, an enormous boon if you know how to use it and put in time up-front, people know who I am even though I'm only an early-career researcher. I follow mostly scientists across all career-stages and politicians with power over work-related fields.
One of the best parts of Twitter is that it can give random people a voice and connect then with people who are often hard to get to otherwise. One of the worst parts of Twitter is that can give random people a voice and connect then with people who are often hard to get to otherwise.
As someone without a Twitter account, I miss out on a huge amount of conversation that IMHO can add productive and interesting insights to, even though I’m not well-known like the participants might be. With time, they might come to know me as well, something which is basically impossible outside of the platform. I have heard that it is also a great place to find jobs or the right people through “the Twitter network” where people are known for what they tend to be good at and people can point you around to where you need to be.
On the other hand, having the ability to get random people to interact with you is basically inviting harassment and polarization. The very benefit I just mentioned of having a “personality” in Twitter which people see you as means that you’ll always be dragged into any conflict along those lines, and anything you say has the potential to blow up in a bad way.
I, from outside the platform, have a much harder time getting any of those benefits I mentioned: fewer people read or look at my stuff, I think, since I publish it elsewhere; I have hundreds of things I leave unsaid because I can’t interact with the platform besides observe it; getting in contact with people who share my interests is much more difficult because I’m often cold emailing them or collaborating with them on something before they know me. I don’t get to know about interesting work opportunities very often. But on the flip side, I don’t get dragged into pointless arguments, at least on that platform, so I guess I’ve just been making that tradeoff ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In the points of fairness, in 10 years of Twitter I haven't gotten into any fights on Twitter? I keep fairly close to the 'science twitter' group, never get any fringe weirdos 'walk in' and start fights, but I myself never start fights, Twitter is not the place nor the tool for that.
I do this as well. Some of the ML (and lately COVID-19) content that gets posted there is absolute gold, but in consuming it I can be inadvertently sucked into other parts of the site. Such unfortunate occurrences are time consuming and generally have a decidedly negative impact on my mental state.
I keep a list of people who I know are well connected and either post high quality content or retweet it, so I get broad coverage of the communities I’m interested in. Unfortunately even the best accounts get caught up in the worst of a Twitter sometimes, but it’s rare, I’ve trained myself to ignore it, and by not having an account I can’t really interact with the people anyways so I don’t get involved in it myself. (Occasionally I do send out emails in response to people’s tweets, and in one case I wrote a blog post that I doubt was ever seen by the person whose tweet prompted it.)
It's mostly a pointless outrage, virtue signaling, approval-seeking, and social climbing sewer-drain of cyberinhibitionism. Taking the proverbial shit with the sugar would run out of toilet paper, and my supplies are low and it's not in-stock anywhere. No one needs that stuff that just won't flush unless they're hopelessly co-dependent on others to move forward.
I’m chuckling here. A tech podcast I listen to completely changed my perspective on Twitter a few years ago for the better: she described it as a cocktail party. You come, pop your head in for a bit, maybe participate in a conversation for a bit, and then go back to life. The corollary is, to get the most out of it, you need to pick which parties you go to! In the weeks and months following that, I significantly changed the set of people I follow, and now my feed is primarily a bunch of happy tech people sharing the cool stuff they’re working on. Occasionally a bit of political drama or other bullshit leaks through, but it’s pretty rare. If it consistently leaks through due to one person, that “unfollow” button is easy to get at!
Edit: oh, I do sometimes search for some kind of current event on there and am generally horrified by the conversations. Yikes! So I close the stream and go back to my happy curated bubble garden.
Twitter isn't healthy or unhealthy. It's about how the platform is used. For discussion of political or social issues, it's garbage, certainly. But there's a lot of other content on Twitter as well.
When the majority of people are using a platform in an unhealthy manner, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the design of the platform itself is at fault. The occurrence of a few successful interactions doesn't change the fact that the majority of social media platforms today exhibit glaring systemic flaws when their interaction models intersect basic human psychology.
Twitter isn't healthy for _anyone_. Neither is the vast majority of social media. The way in which most sites currently structure interactions lends itself quite naturally to misinformation, extreme polarization, and resulting anxiety.
I've personally witnessed the effect on reasonably well educated adults in my life; I can only imagine how much worse it must be for those with less general experience and knowledge.