Why I’ll never quit Twitter – Helen Zille

In the wake of one of South Africa’s biggest Twitter controversies when Helen Zille tweeted that the legacy of colonialism was not “all bad”, she has penned an opinion piece to explain that she will not accede to requests to quit the social media platform.

She is one of the country’s most followed twelebs, with 1.27 million followers at last count.

In her piece she explains that she understood why people she admired, such as Stephen Fry, quit Twitter because it had become, in the British celebrity’s words, a “stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know”.

She then accuses South African analysts of “supporting the authoritarian timeline-trawlers, who search the net for any statement they can misrepresent to manufacture public outrage. And as our mainstream media ratchets things up, even sensible people start believing that the ‘right’ to be shielded from an opposing (or offensive) opinion is as important as the right to free speech.”

To her this is among the main reasons she wants to instead stay on the platform, however.

“Twitter exposes me to a world that would otherwise be entirely outside my realm of experience. And although it can be profoundly alienating, I must acknowledge that it is shaping (and being shaped by) the world-view of a new generation seldom exposed to complex analysis or nuanced debate. It is a world in which facts don’t matter, where history and the present are selectively interpreted to reinforce personal feelings and peer-group prejudices, and where trolls (digital gangs), hunt down anyone with an independent opinion.

“It is a window into the world of millennials which weaves together contradictory qualities such as hyper-sensitivity to perceived offence, and total insensitivity towards the feelings of others. It is a worldview often framed by intolerance, victimhood and entitlement.”

She explained that Twitter can nevertheless still be useful for spotting emerging trends and shifts in the “Zeitgeist” because the relative anonymity of the platform allows people to not only express their true thoughts but also shows how small groups with nefarious agendas can set out to shape public opinion to suit their own ends through using “black ops”.

She expressed concern at how such activity on “dark social” could support “the growing network of agenda-driven campaigns that are not only anonymous but untraceable”, such as what happened in the US elections, allegedly driven by Russian agents to divide American society. She referenced the famous Bell Pottinger “Bots” campaign in South Africa that tried to drive racial polarisation “to influence the ANC’s succession race”, saying that campaign failed since Cyril Ramaphosa was elected president and not Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.

Zille warned on the dangers of such anonymity, arguing “there will come a tipping point where the abuse is so pervasive that it smothers the residual value, and the trolls and bots will be left shouting at each other. Indeed, this is one of the reasons I am often tempted to get off Twitter. But then I think about how valuable the platform could be for airing different opinions and advancing public debate. The potential advantages of such a platform in a democracy are too obvious to surrender without a fight.”

She then writes extensively about what she considers the problem of identity politics in South Africa, where “whiteness” is ultimately translated to the simple understanding that “Whites are the problem in South Africa” – a discourse she describes as “once marginal” but “now it is mainstream”. She evidences this with a reference to Jacob Zuma having attributed South Africa’s ills to “white monopoly capital” in a state address, a problem that “he promised to tackle head-on”.

She expressed hope that such polarising discourse would now change after new president Cyril Ramaphosa said in his state of the nation address that, “We should reaffirm our belief that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. For though we are a diverse people, we are one nation. There are 57 million of us, each with different histories, languages, cultures, experiences, views and interests. Yet we are bound together by a common destiny.”

To Zille, dangerous racial identity politics “has its roots in precisely the same political philosophy as that on which the edifice of apartheid was constructed: Afrikaners, a small minority on the African continent, believed their cultural identity was threatened by majority rule; so Verwoerd developed a plan to balkanise the country so that, in theory at least, each ethnic group would one day govern itself”.

She declared that she would thus remain committed to the “opposite vision for South Africa” as “an inclusive, open, opportunity-driven society, in which each individual is free to determine their own identity, and be evaluated on their personal attributes, not the demographic accident of birth”.

To her, abandoning Twitter would therefore be to abandon “the platforms on which this debate is raging”, and that she would instead remain on “the frontline of a battle that must be fought”.