The Importance of Twitter Feedback Loops

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I did an analysis of intellectuals on Twitter and what their most popular tweets were. The most disturbing category was when people call out a person in power, especially someone who's polarizing where like some people love them and some people hate them. And I think it feels to me that that sort of the thing when we associate something like Twitter with like toxic behavior. It's because there is a genuine reward that people get from not to say that calling out bad people in power is necessarily a bad thing but sometimes it's a bad thing. But whether it's good or bad, depending on the case, like they're getting a reward for that.

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Nick Gillespie is an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine of "free minds and free markets", and host of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Gillespie served as the editor in chief for Reason.com and Reason TV from 2008 through 2017 and was Reason magazine's editor in chief from 2000 to 2008. Under his direction, Reason won the 2005 Western Publications Association "Maggie" Award for Best Political Magazine. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, Slate, Salon, Time.com, Marketplace, and numerous other publications; and he is a frequent commentator on radio and television networks such as National Public Radio, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox Business, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and PBS. He holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He also holds an M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from Temple University and a B.A. in English and Psychology from Rutgers University. Follow him on Twitter at @nickgillespie.