Why Twitter May Be Ruinous for the Left
Something odd happened this week on Twitter: A hashtag became the most popular topic in the country by accident.
After Senator Elizabeth Warren brushed away the handshake of Senator Bernie Sanders in the moments following a debate, Sanders supporters—or at least alleged Sanders supporters—began to tweet #NeverWarren. Several left-leaning journalists and online Sanders surrogates noticed the rising phrase and sent tweets opposing it. But since their tweets accumulated likes and retweets, they only made the hashtag itself more popular. The algorithm that determines the social network’s most popular topics, after all, could not differentiate between a tweet endorsing #NeverWarren and a tweet rejecting it. When the NBC reporter Ben Collins noticed this phenomenon and tweeted about it, his own tweet picked up more than 7,500 likes and retweets, and lofted the hashtag even higher.
It was faintly ridiculous. It seemed to encapsulate many of the issues with hosting the public sphere on Twitter. And it made
