Bullshit in Twitter and Politics

Tweets have become a political tool of expression, information, and argumentation. While in some cases this is intentional, in the interesting and controversial case of Donal Trump, tweets may just be bullshit.

According to Harry Frankfurt, bullshit is everywhere. Everyday we slog through mountains of the epistemically disgusting stuff. But what does bullshit made digital look like? One potential example which receives quite a lot of air time may be President Donald Trump's Twitter feed.

The Trump presidency and campaign are in and of themselves controversial, however those are not the subject of this piece. We will be focusing on the nature of content that comes from this source, how it qualifies as bullshit, and on the epistemic implications of this. This exploration will solely discuss the quality of this source of information, and how its content impacts others.

The inconsistency that can be found in Donald Trump's tweets is certainly not new; as Stephen Colbert expresses, we are used to being shocked by his many tweets of dubious factual quality.

President Trump's Twitter feed has been used as an informative device in many ways. It is pulled from and quoted in the news almost daily, it is both used to attack others for misinformation and attacked by others for the very same concept, it is one man's personal projector for whatever he wants to circulate into the world. Some of his tweets from the past have come back to suggest a hypocrisy or inconsistency of beliefs.  While some consider this proof of his unreliability for the role or President, others re-purpose his content to make their own messages more visible.

These tweets are used to inform others either directly or indirectly. However, the dubious quality of these tweets has led some to conclude that they aren't worth spreading around regardless of  intent because they are bullshit. I would argue that this inconsistency and misleading content isn't meant as a direct lie, but that as Harry Frankfurt suggests, that it has come about by the moderator/producer of this content not caring about what is or isn't true, just what helps meet the ends they require.

The fact that these tweets tend to fall under the  'bullshit' category might even contribute to our ability to deal with them often. We convince ourselves that there is nothing inherently wrong with this because it's not intentional falsehood, it's just someone constantly saying what they want regardless of its epistemic merit (a.k.a. no-filter statements). As Frankfurt would say, we are okay with it because bullshit is artistic and even potentially entertaining - liars are limited to falsehoods, while the bullshitter can say/do anywhere they like and use any beliefs that serve their purpose. And who better to say things they don't mean or care about than politicians?

Ben. "Smells Like Bullshit." 2011.  Meme Center.

What's really frightening is the fact that we are using bullshit tweets as news sources. It has become increasingly rare for a news program to not use tweets as sources of information or conjecture. This further perpetuates the spread and impact of this special kind of digital political bullshit. And no one is immune. Even though we are thinking about it right now, this doesn't mean that we won't fall into the same pattern later, or that we'll be able to identify every instance of bullshit that may have impacted us.

The scary thing about bullshit is that you'll never be able to always know what is or isn't. This causes even highly educated people to create and maintain bullshit; they can also have arrogance that blinds them to the bullshit they are consuming and producing. So, since we're college students we might assume that we can discern what is bullshit and what isn't and still be blindsided by bullshit that we've accepted as truth.

So every time you watch the news, stalk a political figure on Twitter, or even read the paper, you could be consuming loads of bull without ever knowing.

Food for thought:

Is this kind of behavior new in politics?

What other examples of digital or digital political bullshit can you think of?

What direction do you think our society is going with bullshit?

What will happen to the truth?

How do you think that politics and bullshit interact? Is this natural? Should it be?