Internet is an echo chamber for illiberal political correctness

Twitter is not the real world. This may seem an obvious statement if you are not on Twitter. It may appear less so if you are.

The main requirement to be part of the Twitterverse that deals with Irish current affairs is surgical attachment to a smartphone or computer screen, and a job that allows you to check feeds constantly.

This cuts out a significant proportion of the population. It is clear that the self-employed, and those who work in the media and public relations, are going to be online far more often than the average person.

So are politicians, or at least, their proxies. It is, in short, a bubble, which considers itself to be vastly important.

A Sunday Independent poll last week showed over half of thirtysomethings rarely if ever use Twitter, and only 17 per cent use it every day.

One could leave people to their comforting facsimile of the real world, were it not having an impact on media and on general debate.

I know radio and television producers who check Twitter obsessively to see the reaction to programmes. They are getting a skewed result, but I suspect they don’t fully realise it. Meanwhile, they are alienating their core audience.

On Twitter, very unpleasant people have thousands of followers. So do intelligent, courteous people. But which group has more influence?

The echo chamber gets very loud, as people get “called out” for thought crimes. You never know when a tsunami of abuse will be unleashed. Unsurprisingly, the victims’ response is usually shock and withdrawal.

Of course, it is not just Twitter. The internet has allowed a culture of blame and shame that is most notable for its irony deficit.

So much for free speech

For example, not so long ago, people were rightly shocked at the vicious murders in the Charlie Hebdo offices. The event triggered huge debate on free speech. But toleration of free speech is very selective.

Take Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who wrote a gentle satire on political correctness, Do the Left Thing, where he described the “violence” done daily to him as a left-handyd (sic) person in a world of right-handedness.

(The “y” in handyd is a reference to womyn’s studies, for those who defy the patriarchy by refusing to engage in patriarchal spelling.)

It should have ended there. Instead, Mahmood’s apartment door was vandalised by outraged students, who found his satire “triggering”.

Subsequently, he was fired from his job as a columnist with a student paper because it was said his column had created an environment in which the staff felt threatened.

Mahmood’s case was highlighted by Jonathan Chait in a piece in the New York magazine. Chait is a self-described liberal hawk who was very supportive of President Obama’s election.

His thesis is that a suffocating political correctness is destroying the possibility of civilised debate.

Some of the examples he gives make Mahmood’s satire seem anodyne. For example, “UCLA students staged a sit-in to protest microaggressions such as when a professor corrected a student’s decision to spell the word indigenous with an uppercase I.”

Capital punishment

Apparently, such grammatical choices reflect ideologies. Oppression by denial of the right to use capital letters – you simply could not make it up.

Microaggressions, by the way, are small slights that seem insignificant in themselves, but add up to oppressive actions when people are exposed to them every day.

When the Twitterverse speaks about microaggressions, it is a politically correct version of “error has no rights”, a phrase attributed to Pope Pius IX, who did not actually use the precise phrase in his (in)famous 1864 Syllabus of Errors.

Pius IX had the excuse of writing at a time when nuns and priests were being driven from their religious orders, their property confiscated and bishops arrested or exiled for protesting.

There are real injustices in our world too but, ironically, the “error has no rights” attitude which now suffuses the supposed liberal left often damages the very causes they seek to support.

Last November, WomenCam, the Women’s Campaign succeeded in getting both Tim Stanley, who is pro-life, and Brendan O’Neill, who is pro-choice, banned from debating in Oxford.

They claimed that “it is absurd to think we should be listening to two cisgender men debate about what people with uteruses should be doing with their bodies”.

In Ireland, we have a sad tendency to conform: to the rigid consensus of the 1950s, or the apparently ideologically opposite, but in fact, eerily similar 2015 version.

Suffocating illiberalism, thinly disguised this time as progressivism, is alive and well. Just ask anyone who has been caught in a Twitterstorm.