“How can you even question the Holocaust… Don’t be misled by Corbyn.” Home secretary Sajid Javid, 2018, via Twitter.

It wasn’t the kind of tweet that makes headlines – but when our home secretary seemed to imply that the leader of the opposition was an actual Holocaust denier (an inference Javid was later forced to correct), it crystallised a question that has been occupying me for some time: is Twitter not merely a reflection of all today’s political woes but actually the root cause? I realise this sounds hyperbolic, but hear me out.

In a world where action and reaction have essentially become simultaneous, are we only now reaping the consequences of the impact Twitter has had on our politicians, the way they think and the decisions they make? Media students (of which there are far too many these days) may recognise the concept of simultaneous action and reaction. It is an idea of Marshall McLuhan’s, the extraordinary guru of communication and media.

In his 1964 – 1964! A full 25 years before the internet! – book Understanding Media, McLuhan predicted uncannily the chaos a medium like Twitter could cause. His five-word phrase – “the message is the medium” – concisely defined how the qualities of the medium define the message; that the two are intertwined, inseparable.

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By handy example, take Charlie Elphicke (please), MP for Dover and Deal. Despite the fact that his constituency faces becoming the world’s biggest lorry park, Elphicke had time at the weekend to tweet the following: “Out of Europe we will be able to take back control of our tax system – including making Amazon collect UK VAT as they are now required to do in Australia. No wonder they want us to sign up to stop us doing that.”

The fact that the two salient points in his tweet (Britain has full control of its tax system; Amazon do collect UK VAT) are demonstrably false is not the point. Nor is whether Elphicke is being dim-witted, blasé with the truth or plain devious and cynical. Even the fact that this tweet was shared and liked thousands of times by people disinclined or ill-equipped to think for themselves is not the point.

The point is this: in a world where Twitter exists, it is not thought and fact that reign, but speed and impact. Without Twitter, Charlie Elphicke’s message could not even exist. To prove my point further, imagine this unlikely scenario: Charlie Elphicke is invited to write an 800-word think piece in a newspaper on taxation and Amazon. He would have to accord with the particular demands of the printed medium: thoughtfulness, sophistication of argument and reliance on facts. Like I said, it’s an unlikely scenario.

Although a relatively small social network – Twitter has around 330 million active users versus Facebook’s 2.2 billion – the instant gratification it provides, that addictive little dopamine hit, makes it uniquely attractive to egomaniacs (full disclosure: I’m one) who feel the world needs to hear their quick take on anything.

Twitter not only discourages but makes any complex or nuanced argument practically impossible

So consider for a moment the specific characteristics of this media, Twitter. It is of the moment, so it encourages instant reaction, rewards the fast and ignores the slow. It provides direct connection with an audience who literally decide the relative worth of each tweet, so it encourages the tweeter towards crowd-pleasing language and sentiment. And because the whole point of Twitter, unlike Facebook, is brevity, it not only discourages but makes practically impossible any complex or nuanced argument.

Twitter best rewards those who are most willing to abuse these characteristics.

If bleeding-heart liberals are more inclined to take a rounded view of life, then they lose every time on Twitter to the extremists who won’t hesitate to play the game of Twitter as hard as they possibly can. And nowhere is that reality more dangerous than in the hands of the people we elect to resist the characteristics that define Twitter: thoughtlessness, knee-jerkery, crowd playing and unsophisticated argument.

Our politicians.

None of this would be much of a problem if Twitter existed in isolation and did not impact other media or indeed society itself. But impact them it does, profoundly. To take another McLuhan insight, every extension of mankind’s technologies affects all other media and, as a consequence, the lives of us all. Twitter, the starting point for so many political opinions, has become a Petri dish for policy. The thoughts spawned here replicate and amplify until they infect other, older media. A government White Paper, for instance.

And even if you are that rare thing, the MP who does not tweet (and, according to the fascinating site mpsontwitter.co.uk, 582 of our 650 elected representatives are on twitter), you, too, are inevitably influenced by the shift in behaviour all around you.

1,000 words on the corrosive effect Twitter has had on our politicians and we haven’t even talked about Trump yet

I used to think of Twitter as something more or less on its own, a place of amusement and not to be taken at all seriously. A bit like a conversation down the pub. Harmless, if occasionally boisterous, and of no lasting consequence. But today I think more about how Twitter has fundamentally altered news values, our inclination to separate fact from fiction and provided a platform where the qualities we value most in our leaders are positively devalued.

I think about how I myself behave so differently on Twitter than in any other part of my life – more competitive, more aggressive, more cynical, more angry. When I see how those ugly characteristics seem to be getting worse and worse, how Twitter is getting more and more toxic, then I can’t help feeling it is far from a place to be amused. It’s a place to be feared. McLuhan, in 1964, described that era’s media as having induced the "Age Of Anxiety". What would he call our era today? My bet – and since it’s short it will make for a good tweet later – is that we are now living in the "Age Of Collapse".

So there you are: 1,000 words on the corrosive effect Twitter has had on our politicians and we haven’t even talked about Donald Trump yet. I rest my case.

Since we wrote this Charlie Elphicke MP has contacted us to say that his tweet about the tax system is not false. We accept that he honestly believes this

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