The Day of One Million Impressions

On Sunday morning I was kicking back, killing a little time flipping through whatever popped up in my twitter feed. I saw a somewhat provocative post from journalist Matt Taibbi, with a somewhat vague (to me, anyway) accusation: "The worst thing you can do, if you want people to take a vaccine, is lie about it. You don’t realize it, and these people at Stanford may not, but what they massively promoted “hesitancy.” What are we supposed to, not print this?"

Taibbi has been one of Elon Musk's primary go-to people for publishing "the twitter files"; presented as an exposé of how Twitter operated prior to Musk's takeover of the platform last October. A couple days prior, Taibbi had presented episode 19 of the files, which he titled, in his typically understated approach, "The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine - Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of 'True Stories'". The thread was a whopping 45 tweets, and I stopped paying close attention after tweet #6, which ended with this statement: "At least six major Internet platforms were 'onboarded' to the same JIRA ticketing system, daily sending millions of items for review." That was a show-stopper for me in terms of taking the thread too seriously... and I'm saying that as someone who generally likes JIRA.

So, come Sunday, I saw Taibbi's latest missive, I dashed off a quick response: "what did they lie about?"

Seemed like a reasonable enough question to me.

Then... Taibbi responded:

And... we were off.

Taibbi's response seemed a bit iffy to me; I've never liked the monolithic "they" in the conspiratorial sense, especially among those in academia. His assertions are debatable. But my purpose here isn't to debate Taibbi's opinion. It's to what happened next.

Once Taibbi responded, the "impression" count (supposedly the number of times a tweet is viewed; one of Musk's "innovations") soared. As did the number of responses.

When I first noticed the flood of responses, the "impression" count had already reached well over 100,000. I engaged some, briefly, until it became very obvious how silly the idea of continued engagement was. By evening, the impression count was pushing one million, eventually settling at around 1.2 million. I expect the actual number of people was far less than that, but still, it seemed like a lot.

The most popular response to my query? "Everything." Or, variants thereof. And if I clicked the profile of anyone with such a response, I'd invariably see things like "free speech absolutist," "MAGA," or similar. 

Some of the responses tried to be more insulting.

If I were to go on my facebook page and ask, "Who were the Virality Project and what did they lie about?," I'm pre-supposing the response -- to the extent I'd get one at all -- might be something like, "I don't know, and should I care?" That would hardly be due to a lack of awareness as to what's going on in the world. But over in that corner of Twitter, a polite response might be, "Have you been in a coma?"

Then there was this reply, from someone with a Twitter name celebrating Trump: "Have you lived under a rock until just this moment? You're the type of person that will drag us down, so we're leaving you behind, dead weight." Irony having been noted, the Trump celebrant has been blocked. I found quite a few people -- and likely quite a few not people -- to block. A few added me to "lists," and a few more "followed" me. They've been removed, but it was fun for a hot minute.

To be sure, there were a few who also took shots at Taibbi's assertions, but at least there, they were vastly outnumbered.

It's tempting, of course, to make something out of the 1.2 million views, though 2 days later it's largely already forgotten. No one on facebook noticed. I received a single email from a friend, titled simply, "Damn!!" That, more or less, summed it up.