Wrong Speak For The Right Reasons

I joined Twitter (@JoelBrownMD) for the second time in February 2022, after a failed run over the previous decade. I figured I’d keep a low profile, perusing the quiet digital back alleys of the #medtwitter hashtag to get a sense of what was going on in my professional circuit without stirring up any controversy. The medical world certainly has its own delicious array of hot potatoes such as where you happen to land on mandatory COVID vaccinations or whether you support nurse industrial action or not, but becoming a Twitter influencer was not on my list of career aspirations. I had personally grown to hate what social media does to me and countless others. There is a sense in which it's become almost a rite of passage to become the tool instead of using it as a tool.

The old cliche comes to mind that says if you're getting something for free, you are the product. I am reluctant to be tossed and turned by algorithms that manipulate what I think or say to score dopamine hits on its primed users. I took the bait and paid 8 bucks a month for Elon’s Twitter 2.0 and really started to enjoy this newfound freedom to really speak my mind on more controversial matters like race and politics. I started to find similar-minded people who shared many of my views but also got the expected pushback from colleagues who were surprised at how outspoken I had become. But the scale was small, I didn't feel the dynamic tensions of managing the varying appetites of a large audience.

Everything changed last Christmas, the end of 2022.

To be more specific, my Twitter account sky-rocketed from 1k to 24.5k followers over a 2-week period. In one month my tweets had 6 million impressions, 159k likes, 17.5k retweets, and 11.3k replies. Now I had to obsess about the meaning of every tweet with mind-frying precision. Mistakes are magnified and much less forgivable on that scale. I started to get invitations to share my opinions on multiple podcasts and it began to make much greater demands than I really accounted for.

Navigating conversations on polarising topics 280 characters at a time became a precise, labor-intensive science overnight. I joined Wrong Speak because I wanted to grow the courage to speak wrongly without inhibition as is our motto, but if I'm honest, making mistakes in front of 6 million eyeballs hits differently from a few hundred. This is especially the case where so much could hang in the balance from getting it wrong. I'm not trying to be a shock value writer, that says the things a particular tribe wants to hear to score likes and retweets. I want to be an intellectually honest writer, who says what I mean and mean what I say, but sometimes a tweet is just not enough.

The temptation on Twitter as you grow this quickly is to keep up with the pace of virality by saying things that trigger another viral moment. But the truth is, I'm here for the nuance, to explore the liminal space where truth often lies between tribalistic extremes. I want to take responsibility for the audience I am growing on Twitter, but I don't want to become another spoke in the wheels of the algorithm - a digital slave. When conversing on topics that naturally divide us like race, politics, gender, and sexuality, my earnest hope is to be a voice of reason and level-headedness, someone able to enter complex discourse with those of varying perspectives and not feel tied to a tribal leash, or feeling like I am chained to a particular ideology. This is why I express my thoughts here as Twitter just isn't enough for me on its own. If I am gonna speak wrongly, I at least want to do it for the right reasons.