Twitter is a fountain of untruth and a test to Iowa’s culture of 'nice'

Trick question: How many characters does it take to kill truth? There are two answers: 280 Twitter keystrokes or 1.3 billion Twitter users.

"There was a time when some intelligent observers of social media believed that Twitter was a 'truth machine' — a system whose capacity for rapidly debunking falsehoods outweighed its propensity for spreading them,” Slate reported in March 2018. “Whatever may have remained of that comforting sentiment can probably now be safely laid to rest.”

Slate cited a study in the journal Science that found rumors on Twitter typically spread faster and farther than tweets that eventually were proved to be true. Bots, Russian or otherwise, weren’t the reason for the falsehoods. People were.

Twitter is a font of untruth and a test to Iowa’s culture of “nice.” 

Once I asked a South Dakota rancher about the customary politeness of our neighborly state. “It snows,” he said. “If you are not nice to neighbors, we leave you in the ditch.”

Weather shapes morals. So does agriculture, which literally takes a village. 

Iowa has some 87,500 farms with more than 97 percent of those owned by farm families, according to the Corn Promotion Board.

Farmers rely on neighbors, a hallmark of our state.

In 2016, KCCI reported that a 63-year-old farmer in Radcliffe fractured his hip in the middle of harvest, with his neighbors rescuing the remaining 95 acres of corn. The Register followed up on that piece in an Oct. 24, 2016 article, adding cultural history and a photo:

“Iowans have a long tradition of helping out their neighbors. In 1950, a cow kicked Polk City farmer Leland Harvey in the leg, and neighbors showed up with 22 tractor-drawn plows to finish plowing and planting.”

One year later, on Oct. 25, 2017, the Register ran a story titled, “Neighbors pull together to harvest Iowa farmer's last crop.” Three dozen neighbors of his widow showed up with combines, grain carts and semis to harvest 235 acres of corn and 165 acres of soybeans.

What does this have to do with Twitter?

In these two farm stories — about a broken hip and a broken heart — neighbors were defined by their conscience, not by their political affiliation. It didn’t matter whether they were liberal or conservative, whether they voted for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, whether they supported or decried the NFL anthem rule, or whether Roseanne Barr should or should not have had her show canceled because of her tweets.

I am writing after ABC canceled the hit show “Roseanne” in the aftermath of its star’s rants. Barr, a controversial character, tweeted that an Obama-era public servant was descended from the “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes.”

That barb was directed at Valerie Jarrett, former presidential senior adviser, who holds degrees from Stanford and the University of Michigan. Her great-grandfather, Robert Robinson Taylor, was the first black to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His likeness appears on a U.S. stamp, which Jarrett celebrated in 2015.

Barr has First Amendment rights like the rest of us. And like the rest of us, she suffers consequences when voicing those rights in a racist, offensive or otherwise inappropriate manner.

Here’s where it gets tricky, though, and why I wrote this Iowa View. 

Like everyone else, I have convictions, fears and biases about the state of politics and the world. In private conversation with my spouse or with myself while grousing at the television, I am apt to espouse strong beliefs that I would never tweet or post to social media.

Reason? I have beloved students, book readers, good neighbors and treasured colleagues and take pains to post my views in tempered language. I learned this early on in my academic career from the great Canadian social critic, Northrop Frye, author of "The Well-Tempered Critic," one of the best literary books of the 20th century.

Frye wrote that we should strive for a rich, conscious life empowered by elegant language and enhanced by ethical considerations. That’s just a fancy way of saying “Iowa nice.”

Iowa has long been the standard for political life in the United States, which is on display when we hold the first presidential caucus in election years. 

Many pundits claim that we do not represent the diversity and mindset of most U.S. voters. That may be true, but I always felt our culture of kindness, tempered speech and moral conscience were benchmarks for the rest of the country to follow.

Here’s the rub: Tempered, ethical, truthful speech on Twitter and other social media will likely go unread while sensational, immoral, deceitful speech will be acted upon in virality.

May we reflect on that now as our fields have been planted and preserve what remains of Iowa culture as elections follow the next harvest and beyond.  

Michael Bugeja, the former director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, teaches media ethics at Iowa State University. These views are his own.