Source: Politics<\/p>\n
It shouldn\u2019t be hard, one would think, to simply not tweet. That\u2019s all it would have taken to spare Neera Tanden the situation she\u2019s in: Had she kept her political outrage to herself, or shared it offline in the company of friends, she might be sailing to confirmation as director of the Office of Management and Budget, rather than watching the chances of her nomination slowly dwindle. And what would have been the loss? The internet is overflowing with snarky diatribes about Senators Susan Collins and Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell. A veteran political player, who might someday need Cruz or Collins or McConnell for a vote, should have known it would do her no good to pile on. And, on some level, she did<\/i> know: In 2016, she told<\/a> an interviewer, \u201cI\u2019m willing to concede I should tweet less.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, Tanden did what a lot of us do: She went for the dopamine hit, again and again. Over the past few years, she tweeted that \u201ca vampire has more heart than Ted Cruz,\u201d compared McConnell to Voldemort, and called Collins \u201ccriminally ignorant.\u201d It wasn\u2019t just Republicans she angered; she was also known for tweaking left-wing rivals like Senator Bernie Sanders, suggesting in one tweet that Russia had helped Sanders in the 2016 election. Some have detected sexism in the sudden rush to scold her, but Tanden stands out among Biden\u2019s Cabinet nominees for the edginess of her social media posts. <\/b><\/p>\n In hindsight, it looks like a repeated lapse of judgment. But to some extent, this was part of Tanden\u2019s job. As a president of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress and a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, she was frequently deployed as an attack dog, especially during campaigns and news crises. And Twitter was a natural ally in that work\u2014like Washington, it was also a place where making all the right people mad could be an asset. <\/p>\n But Twitter has its own way of tempting you into provocative tweets, and then turning on you\u2014especially when you make enough enemies from different points on the political spectrum, and they find a common moment for revenge. <\/p>\n A onetime Boston political boss named Martin Lomasney, who wielded power in the late 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> centuries, had an oft-repeated rule for politicians: \u201cNever write if you can speak, never speak if you can nod, never nod if you can wink.\u201d Lomasney would surely have run in the other direction from Twitter, which isn\u2019t just public but permanent. Yes, Donald Trump played the platform like a virtuoso; other politicians have used it savvily to bypass gatekeepers and build a base of loyalists. But for a political player, every tweet is fraught with peril: Even if you aren\u2019t overtly insulting someone, there\u2019s a chance some statement from your past will contradict a current political stance, or apply with poetic justice to a compromising situation. <\/p>\n Still, political types are also human beings, and the temptation to pour every thought onto Twitter, in search of a reaction, is ultimately biological. When you put out a tweet, anticipating a \u201clike\u201d or a \u201cshare,\u201d your brain gets a hit of a pleasure neurochemical, says psychiatrist David Greenfield, founder and medical director of the Connecticut-based Center for Internet and Technology Addiction. At the same time, he says, the brain cuts off its pathways to the frontal cortex, the area that governs judgment. Once, this shutdown of higher-level thinking was a convenient evolutionary tool, Greenfield says: Prehistoric hunter-gatherers needed to shut out reason to serve the higher directives of mating and eating. Today, though, it has given us an internet that functions like \u201cthe world\u2019s largest slot machine,\u201d he says, as users embark on an endless hunt for validation. Tanden\u2019s nakedly partisan tweets could derive her plenty of pleasure; one tweet<\/a> during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh\u2014\u201cSusan Collins\u2019 terrible treatment of Dr. Ford should haunt Collins for the rest of her days\u201d\u2014drew 3,097 retweets and 8,295 likes. <\/p>\n In the age of the ideological bubble, political tweets pose a specific kind of risk. If you\u2019re sharing like-minded partisan thoughts with like-minded people, you\u2019re likely to forget that you risk a negative reaction, says Whitney Phillips, a communications professor at Syracuse University and co-author of the upcoming book You Are Here: A Field Guide For Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape<\/i><\/a>.<\/i> \u201cYou speak in a code that\u2019s appropriate for the audience,\u201d Phillips says. But once your statement lands in front of a less-friendly group, your intentions don\u2019t matter. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to control any of our messages,\u201d she says. \u201cYou can only focus on the consequences.\u201d Tanden\u2019s tweets, it\u2019s fair to say, weren\u2019t as troublesome as Gunn\u2019s. She was largely pumping out standard-issue political snark, the kind Trump used to post from the White House on nearly an hourly basis. Still, there are rules of political conduct, and\u2014if you\u2019re not Trump\u2014consequences for breaking them. In 2008, Samantha Power, then an advisor to presidential candidate Barack Obama, resigned from the campaign after telling a Scottish reporter that Hillary Clinton was a \u201cmonster.\u201d Power had violated a norm: voicing the kind of insult that\u2019s usually shared, Lomasney-style, outside the public view. (Post-election, her career recovered quickly.) And, like Gunn, Tanden succeeded in getting both groups\u2014those on the left and the right\u2014on her bad side. If everything you tweet can be used as ammunition in the future, it\u2019s particularly lethal when it\u2019s coming at you from all sides. <\/b> Tanden did her duty and apologized profusely, hinting that she wanted to distance herself from the cesspool Twitter had become. But the truth is, she was following the rules of her chosen medium all along. There\u2019s no point in tweeting if you aren\u2019t<\/i> saying something that can rile people up. \u201cOur networks have been designed for this exact outcome,\u201d Phillips says. \u201cThe most rancorous stuff becomes the stuff that is most visible, that has the most purchase.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, the internet did everything in its power to make Tanden act the way she did, rewarded her with nearly 377,000 followers, then punished her in the end. And yet, with every tweet, she had free will. Greenfield counsels his patients who want to change their internet habits to never actually type out a tweet in the \u201ccompose\u201d box, in Twitter or any other social media platform. Rather, he says, type your message in the Notes app, think about it for a minute, and cut and paste when you\u2019re good and ready. Martin Lomasney would have considered that decent advice.<\/p>\n
Phillips cites an internet axiom known as \u201cPoe\u2019s Law\u201d\u2014coined in the early 2000s, on a message board for creationists, when a user who called himself <\/a>Nathan Poe declared that it was hard to discern the true believers from people who were being sarcastic. On the internet, Poe\u2019s Law holds, you can\u2019t know anybody\u2019s true intentions. A commenter could be sincere or mocking, a real human being or a fake account. Anger could be deeply-felt or cynically overblown. And it\u2019s easy to weaponize the outrage machine. It was a right-wing provocateur\u2014hoping to reveal what he saw as Hollywood hypocrisy\u2014who unearthed incendiary old jokes<\/a> about rape and pedophilia from \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy\u201d filmmaker James Gunn\u2019s Twitter feed in 2018, Phillips notes. But it was left-wing outrage over those tweets that ultimately got Gunn fired. <\/p>\n
<\/b>
Tanden clearly realized that old tweets could cause her trouble in this new career moment, when she had to emerge from her Clinton-Biden bubble and confront her onetime targets in the flesh. Soon after Biden named her to the budget post, she deleted at least 1,000 tweets. But the internet never forgets. And, in keeping with Poe\u2019s Rule, it has been hard to tell who on Capitol Hill is truly horrified, and who merely senses a political opportunity. At her confirmation hearing before the Budget Committee, Sanders chided Tanden for her \u201cvicious attacks made against progressives. People who I have worked with. Me personally.\u201d But he also has a longer-standing beef with Tanden over the 2016 election and her ideological agenda. And he seems not the type to wither in front of an insult.<\/p>\n