Maggie Haberman, who is a White House correspondent, explains why she is taking a step back from Twitter. She argues that the platform is not only damaging for her emotionally, but that it may also be dangerously distorting power dynamics in our democracy.
On Twitter, everything is shrunk down to the same size, making it harder to discern what is a big deal and what is not. Tone often overshadows the actual news. All outrages appear equal. And that makes it harder for significant events — like Mr. Trump’s extraordinarily pliant performance with President Vladimir Putin of Russia — to break through.
[…]To be clear, Twitter is a useful and important platform. It’s a good aggregator for breaking news. I still check my feed to see breaking news developments, and I will continue to. And it is democratic — everyone gets to have a voice, whether they work for a local paper, a small TV station or one of the biggest newspapers in the world, or are not in the media business at all. The downside is that everyone is treated as equally expert on various topics.
Across Twitter, there’s a raging debate about the role that journalists should be playing in the current moment. It is mostly waged by partisans who want to accuse journalists of malpractice or who want us to be the “opposition party,” as Mr. Trump has claimed. There is an important discussion about journalism that must take place, including about how all of us performed during the 2016 campaign, but Twitter is not where a nuanced or thoughtful discussion can happen.
Source: Maggie Haberman: Why I Needed to Pull Back From Twitter – The New York Times