My First Viral Tweet

April 5th, 2021

Today Twitter's algorithm decided to take a two-day old reply of mine & show it to over 100,000 people, most of whom mistook the word "could" for "should" and/or didn't scroll up to read the tweet immediately preceding mine. I do think it is possible for the state to run sex work, but I don't think it should so so or even exist. Just because a thing can be done does not mean it should be done. Since sex work can be nationalized, I do not think Leninist vitriol towards it is because it can't be nationalized (or I didn't think so on Saturday, anyway).

Although my notifications are essentially broken for now, it’s all good. I got a few more followers, and traffic to my blog has increased. Both of those were pretty low anyway, so it doesn't take much for it make a big difference percentagewise. If I were trying to make money off my blog, I'd post deliberately inflammatory tweets to go viral again and again, generating more traffic.

Twitter’s algorithm deliberately showed my reply to people who would get outraged over it in order to stir up engagement. Getting you engaged is a way to keep you on the platform and looking at ads, which is how Twitter makes its money.

Most of the people who were upset by the tweet made an innocent mistake and simply misread it or misunderstood the context. Some enjoy the dopamine hit they get from wagging their finger at other people. A handful knowingly chose to misread the tweet out of anti-anarchist hostility. No matter what the reason, the algorithm has enough data that it is able to make educated guesses about how we'll react and it uses that to decide which tweets to show us. Twitter is manipulating all of us, including anti-capitalists; stirring up outrage to get us to look at ads.