Your Social Media Experience is Bad, Regardless of Race and Gender

No Twitter Reprieve for White Men

My soft Cold War with Awful Announcing is trundling along, this time in an article titled, Mina Kimes denies claims Bluesky is a liberal echo chamber amid ‘Xodus’. The post is an aggregation of star ESPN NFL analyst Kimes relaying why she’s looking to Bluesky as an alternative to her horrible experience on Twitter/X. The conversation happened on Pablo Finds Out, which, incidentally, is a very well done podcast.

First off, I give Awful Announcing its credit. Much as I occasionally disagree with how they frame situations, they also highlight aspects of the sports media discourse that otherwise would be lost to posterity. Maybe that’s not the most valuable job in the world, but I appreciate it.

I think my main issue with Awful Announcing is that the posts can sometimes feel a bit Gawker-era in ideological tone, which means it slides out of place in today’s evolving sports media culture. I’m not the boss of them, they get to do their own thing. That’s just how I see it. It’s not a prime example, but this aside from Brandon Kleen about Kimes “leaving” Twitter/X for BlueSky feels pre-2020 to me.

As an Asian-American woman at the worldwide leader in sports covering a male-dominated sport with an audience in more socially conservative areas of the U.S., Kimes likely has a far different experience on X than someone like U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips or sports media critic Ethan Sherwood Strauss, who have both come out vocally against the #Xodus happening since Musk helped Donald Trump win the presidential election.

Oh there I am, somehow sharing a cause with Dean Phillips. Did I come out “vocally” against the #Xodus? I’m not sure I did exactly that, but I get why my article got summarized in that way. Forget about my precious need to feel fully understood, though. I’m more interested in the assertion that Kimes’ terrible Twitter/X experience is downstream of census categories + football.

As much as the paragraph makes me roll my eyes, it’s actually, strictly speaking, true. I do not have the same exact Twitter/X experience as Mina Kimes, popular figure within regular sports media and controversial figure within conservative sports media. I’m not sure I’d describe the NFL as having “an audience in more socially conservative areas of the U.S.,” but football fandom skews conservative and Kimes is a liberal. There are people who hate her political expressions and some of those people will, as she tells it, call her a “DEI hire.” That seems pretty unpleasant.

The Awful Announcing paragraph is like a more muted version of something said by Richard Deitsch in the interview with Howard Beck I wrote about last week.

I think both Howard and I are self aware, to certainly state that, we have not gotten any of the animus nearly as badly as people of color or writers of color and women, both of us are in a ridiculous privileged position of being White Males so you know, again, like, Howard I’ve gotten my share of bullshit, but I’m pretty self aware that it’s nothing compared to what a ton of others have got.

I don’t feel great excerpting a podcast snippet for critique because it happens to me after I casually riff, but the speech was an illustrative “record scratch” pause in an otherwise flowing conversation. That statement felt way more pre-2022 privilege checking than the Awful Announcing one, and it made me wonder how prevalent this sort of thinking will remain in mainstream sports media as culture shifts.

This over the top, “ridiculous privileged position of being White and/or male” trope used to be all the rage, often invoked to either dismiss someone’s opinion or attack them as a form of cosmic comeuppance. Back in the days of Robin DiAngelo’s prominence, so much of high society was obsessed with this idea that certain census categories were having dramatically better experiences than other census categories.

But is it true in this context? Nobody can really know, but you’re socially disincentivized to question the premise in legacy media.

While it’s (still) fashionable in some circles to assert that Twitter/X is absolute hell for certain types of people and relatively peachy for others, I apply the Anna Karenina principle to all users. As Tolstoy wrote:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

My adaptation:

All happy Twitter users are alike (not tweeting); each unhappy Twitter user is unhappy in their own way.

As a White male I…don’t think I’ve been spared much Twitter toxicity in recent years? Ever since I stopped NBA beat writing, I rarely engage with the platform beyond tweeting story links. Even that minimal level of contact sometimes sets off firestorms of rage from other writers. You wouldn’t want to be my Twitter on the day I committed the horrific sin of musing about how the NBA should have shared team names with the WNBA. You wouldn’t want to be my Twitter on the day I decided to be ahead of the curve on noticing that punter Matt Araiza was provably innocent of gang rape allegations. You wouldn’t want to be my Twitter on the day the Cavinder twins got publicly mad at my Free Press article.

When these stupid controversies happened, you’d better believe that my census categories were derisively invoked, sometimes by people with good standing at mainstream outlets. No, the point isn’t that I have it bad, or worse than Kimes, or that I deserve your sympathy. I can’t measure relative unpleasantness of her run-ins with Oukick versus my run-ins with journalists who hate Outkick. The point is that social media is bad in its own special way for every public facing person. People have their particular issues with me that are unique to whatever it is I do and however I’m viewed.

I reject this idea that White males can’t perceive how bad it is on Twitter/X because we’re living in this social media version of Pleasantville. Many of the defectors from Twitter to BlueSky appear to be White men. Two of the most prominent people immediately disillusioned with the new platform are Mark Cuban and Rob Reiner. No, I’m not making the case that social media is worst for Jews.

Instead I’m saying that the old Great Awokening media focus on race/gender, with a hierarchy in mind to mediate disagreements, reminds me of an exhausting movement. It is now an exhausted movement. The recent Media Way, of constant standpoint epistemology, was aggravatingly anti universalistic. The persistent theme was that you’re both not an individual and also not someone who shares a wholly common humanity. While I don’t love everything about the current vibe shift, I’m glad to see that mentality on the wane. Twitter sucks for me like it sucks for you: In its own specific way.