Replying to Tweets

Under each displayed tweet, there will appear a number of icons, one of which is the 'Reply' icon.

Clicking this, will allow you to reply, directly, to that tweet but beware. Other users can reply to your tweets, too. So long as Twitter rules are complied with, they can tweet any reply they wish and you may not find some comments so pleasant to read.

Comments and replies

You will inevitably at some point get responses to your own tweets. Some comments you may well not like, because they appear rude, dismissiv or ill-considered (and they may be all of these). The temptation may be to respond in kind. Instead the following may be a better course of action:

First, make sure that you are connecting the reply to the right tweet. Some send out many tweets a day and, so, get many responses in their notifications. Sometimes a tweet looks bad, because it is connecting to the wrong thread. Check which of your tweets they are actually replying to!

Secondly, check the account of the sender and see what they tweet about. My tweets are often responded to, by troll accounts and getting a reply, saying “why don’t you f*ck right off” or some other abuse is never pleasant. However, if you can see from their other output that they are unpleasant, this can help to depersonalise it.

Trolls are trying to get a strong reaction, so they use language and insults, like this. Don’t respond, block the account, report, if it infringes Twitter rules and move on. Even if you are unhappy with a response, but choose to reply, It is recommended that you always reply with courtesy and politeness (although without backing down from your beliefs). It has been found that, in these situations, continuing to be reasonable will bring in the support of other readers and is also very important for gaining followers.

Some people suggest that when checking out an account, to decide if to follow someone, reading the comments is the most revealing aspect of the true person. To some extent you can “fake it” in your tweets but, in your replies, you show who you truly are.

When writing a reply to any tweet, remember that sometimes your reply will appear in some other people’s timelines, without being attached to the tweet you are responding to. When you are typing it and can see the original, it’s easy to make sense of what you are saying. Ask yourself when you read the reply and before you hit “send”, whether the tweet can be understood on its own; sometimes adding a little repeat information can make it both a reply to the original tweet and a new tweet for other readers too.

A simple example - we tend to use pronouns in the response, so, in replying to a tweet about Michael Gove, we might use “he” or “him” in our response. To someone who doesn’t know the original tweet is about Gove, this does not narrow the field much. If we write “Gove” instead of “he” or “him” then anyone can understand.

Arguing on Twitter

The question, posed, was “how do you argue with someone who disagrees, e.g. on climate change?”. There is no extensive explanation here (not least because the basic suggestion is “don’t bother”) but here are a few general thoughts on the topic.

Firstly, many people have very fixed views on particular topics. Twitter has some raging Brexiters, raging Remainers, Muslim zealots, rampant atheists, and so on and so on. In practice many of them are not going to change their minds, based on your brilliant eloquence, so it’s best to be realistic about this up front and cut your losses.

Secondly the medium of Twitter does not help. The 280 character limit for a tweet enforces people to take short cuts, to stay within the limit, which can frequently lead to misunderstandings. One suggestion here is that if you are following each other then discussing via DM (where you can express yourself at greater length) may improve the chances of your communicating clearly to each other.

Telling someone that they are an idiot may be cathartic for you but it isn’t going to make your argument more persuasive - the emotion you create by telling people they are stupid will be a further barrier to them even listening to your argument, let alone being swayed by it. Even mild abuse will get you nowhere.

One idea to think about is that asking people questions can be more effective than bombarding them with facts or argument, (especially as some people reject any data which does not fit their chosen world view). Most importantly, know when to cut your losses. When  debating with some Brexiters, for example, there is a group whose argument for Brexit basically boils down to talking about “17.4 million”, “taking back control” and “blue passports”. It should be treated like a checklist. If these are the initial responses, that’s a sign that it won’t get anywhere. Time to move on...