These days, Twitter is a political playground and everyone is the schoolyard bully. A viral tweet of Elizabeth Warren and Kate McKinnon’s Saturday Night Live take on a TikTok trend found itself the center of debate this weekend after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tweeted her praise (“ok this is legendary”) for the former presidential candidate, who dropped out of the race last week. A quick scroll of the replies will confirm what many of us already know to be true: Social media is a hellscape, and the flames are getting hotter as the Democractic party narrows down to its two frontrunners: former vice president Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders.

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A breakdown of the tweeted replies — over a TikTok set to Drake, of all things — shows two primary camps: users who are upset with AOC for complimenting Warren after she failed to endorse Sanders, and users who claim the pushback from Sanders's supporters is unwarranted. Again, we’re talking about a TikTok set to Drake. Both camps have a point, but the dogpile of insults and echo-chambering leaves little room for seeing eye to eye.

It’s worth remembering that we all can, and should, log off. Social media is purposefully engineered to be loud and divisive, designed to draw users back for more. But in a time when politicians are treated more like celebrities than policy makers, it’s up to us, said social media users, to reevaluate how much weight we want to give our apps.

Spending hours on Twitter arguing over whether people perceive Sanders as an abusive father or Warren as a nice mom isn’t the best use of our time in the final stages of a crucially important presidential primary. And, amid a frenzied debate over who should get Warren's endorsement now that she’s out of the race, we should probably be focused on the policy record and platforms of the remaining candidates than GIFs their respective followers tweeted at us.

The conversation on Twitter gets an outsize amount of attention because so many politicians and journalists use the platform. But that makes it easy to forget that only 22% of American adults use the platform, as a 2019 Pew survey found. An even smaller number actively uses the platform, and the majority of people on the site are younger, wealthier, and more highly educated than U.S. adults overall, according to Pew. To put it bluntly: The site is an echo chamber. And when the stakes are literally life or death — reminder: medical debts are essentially racketeering, children are still being held in detention camps, and the climate crisis continues to escalate — those who care deeply about politics should be talking to as broad a swath of voters as possible.

Democrats who want to influence the result of this primary are much better off phone-banking, canvassing, or even talking to people in their lives who have different political views than they are picking fights with strangers online. Talk about health care and student loan debt. Make the case for your candidate’s vision for what this country could look like. I am not asking people to swallow their feelings of disappointment, rage, or betrayal; I am simply asking everyone to channel those emotions towards more productive ends.

As tempting as it is, tweeting our feelings will not win an election; what it will do is take focus off the issues and create further tension within a party that is already dangerously divided. Now more than ever, the Democratic Party needs to get offline.

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