During his interview with the New York Times, American writer famous for “American Psycho” and “Less Than Zero” Bret Easton Ellis criticized Twitter’s efforts to police the speech on their platform.
Ellis positions himself in the center of the political spectrum and considers himself a liberal. He is quite active on Twitter where he recently caused a significant disturbance by criticizing how social media promotes echo chambers.
He noticed that people on social media make judgments quickly. “…And since everyone’s so hysterical, you are tagged things that you are not,” the author said in his interview adding how such judgments are often incorrect due to the lack of nuance or context in short tweets:
“Lately what’s bothered me is the tweeting world, and how, since there’s no context, no nuance, and since everyone’s so hysterical, you are tagged things that you are not,” Ellis said. “The language police is a hard thing to deal with if you are creative.”
Ellis is also known for his criticism regarding the newest tendencies in the movie industry where producers are “smoothing edges” to make films less offensive or as inclusive as possible dramatically limiting artists’ creativity. In his interview with NYT, Ellis suggested that liberals should less obsess with politics and dedicate more time to enjoying life.
Some context
Twitter’s decisions to introduce additional measures to reduce online bullying and harassment resulted in a controversial sequence of events including noteworthy bans of mostly conservative personalities like Meghan Murphy, Laura Loomer, and Alex Jones of InfoWars.
The integrity of Twitter management was questioned multiple times by many centrists and right-wing personalities. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to talk with Tim Pool about issues related to Twitter’s language policing.
Ellis’ comments about the mass hysteria that slowly consumes social media is understandable in this context as more and more people are being targeted by either agenda-driven or even indifferent algorithms for their political views and careless remarks.
Twitter is a massive social media platform with 326 million monthly active users. Twitter is used as a primary form of communication between the president of the USA and Americans. It is often used as a source of news of educational information by millions of users all over the world. Considering the impact of the platform, concerns voiced by Ellis and many other prominent public figures are more than justified.
