If Instagram is the social medium for athletes and models, LinkedIn the platform for career tigers and Facebook the channel for cat and small brood photos, then Twitter is the portal for the eternal know-it-all. Nowhere do phenomena like whataboutisms (comparisons, intended to expose the hypocrisy of others) and virtual signalling (demonstrations of your own moral correctness) as lavish as on this app. Anyone who wants to can be amazed every day on Twitter about the opinions of others and feel ‘exalted’ above them with a witty comment.
Since April 2015, Twitter has a function that lends itself perfectly to the better known: the ‘Quote Tweet’ function. Until then you could only pass on the tweets of others (the ‘retweet’), since then you can also comment on them. In this way you place yourself as a messenger at a distance from what you pass on.
This brought a new Twitter phenomenon to the fore. The ‘Quote Tweet’ ratio: the ratio between the number of retweets and the number of quoted tweets and comments. Last week was a textbook example of this.
Journalist Stéphanie Hoogenberk garnered 711 most disapproving quote tweets and only 15 retweets with a tweet about a friend who approached “a nice man” on Twitter and asked if he wanted to have a beer sometime. “Nice man says, ‘Good idea!’ And then: ‘Where?’ I can’t draw the Dutch man more typical for you.”
Dutch-speaking Twitter thought otherwise. In addition to 711 comments, more than 1,500 comments were her share, most of them negative. Because it is never right or wrong, that was the gist of most of the comments. If a man is assertive, he is accused of being pushy. If he leaves the initiative too much to the woman, then he is a wimp who misses a chance to win a woman’s heart.
you are ratio’d
The conclusion, from many comments: you are ratioed. Twitter slang for: The online community rejected your comment. In many cases, also in this case, you are the subject of ridicule for days. Men in particular were not indifferent: didn’t Hoogenberk’s tweet say everything about the Dutch woman? Hoogenberk immediately capitalized on this round of online fuss by drawing attention to her podcast that she would record about this issue. As if she cared.
People with a healthier media diet will think: what are these tweeters doing to themselves and others? All those opinions, also about what has been the most dangerous battleground of all battlegrounds since the beginning of time: the relationships between man and woman. Ration often beats Reason.
And yet, contradiction on Twitter can also lead to advancing insight. Dutch Twitter saw former Theologian of the Fatherland Stefan Paas compare the purchase of a car with an abortion last week. Why should you have a mandatory reflection period for the first time and should that be abolished in the case of an abortion?
He too was, in Twitter jargon, ratioed. But after defending his equation with fire and sword for a day, he withdrew it. Not because he was tired of the fuss, but because he “could no longer defend her”. Perhaps that’s why even the most notorious know-it-alls stay on Twitter. A reply can be beneficial.