This essay, on Twitter, engagement ad democracy, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on Bryan Magee.) It was published on 7 July 2019, under the headline ‘Twitter won’t ruin the world. But constraining democracy would’. Has the retweet ruined the world? Chris Wetherell, the software developer who built Twitter’s retweet button, thinks so. Introduced in 2009, retweeting transformed the social media landscape, he suggests, by allowing people to pass on information without having bothered to […]

Categories: Politics, Science & Technology • Tags: brexit, democracy, donald trump, education, fake news, social media, social polarisation, technology, twitter