If you want to know where the world’s crazies go for recreation, sign on to Twitter for an hour or two. It will become abundantly clear.

As an aside, it’s still Twitter for me, and not the single letter name that its new owner Elon Musk has decided for it. More about Mr. M. later.

Yesterday I responded, almost in passing, to a man who said that Canada and the US were very nearly Communist dictatorships. I suggested that he was wrong, and that he might visit China, or North Korea, to see what a real Communist dictatorship looks like. He replied that he thought I was being myopic, presented ten reasons why he though he was right, and suggested that he could send me more information if I was interested. Well, the ten reasons revolved around suggesting policies of right-wing governments are Communist, guns make people free, and God should be part of any practical government, and by that he meant the Christian god.

Being a reasonable fellow, I took time counter each of his points, without being rude, and point out how his assumptions were somewhat off the mark. I also suggested that without a revolution, both the US and Canada were never going to be Communist, which of course they won’t be. He responded to that with six new posts, all with more detailed parts of his manifesto, and threw in some ghastly conspiracy theories about the World Health Organization (WHO), and the nefarious intent of Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden. When people start telling me that the WHO have some secret plan to take over the world then they’ve lost me, they’ve gone off into fairy land and will never be able to conduct a sensible debate. I read what he’d posted, then blocked him, which is something you have to do when confronted with such ridiculous theories.

That was just one person, and there are thousands, probably millions, more. Sheesh.

It doesn’t help that since Musk has taken over, he’s allowed the algorithms that decide what you see to lurch to his own, twisted, populist worldview. Every day I see posts from people like my friend I mentioned earlier, posts from random right-wing media outlets, ring-wing journalists and right-wing politicians, all of which are summarily blocked, but still they come. It’s curious that I never see any posts from random centrists or left of centre people. Something from Wab Kinew, or Sean Fraser, people like that, but they don’t appear. Yes. I can search those good people out, but why do I get posts dropped into my feed that are clearly counter to my personal views? I’m not the only one who has noticed this, either.

I get it, Twitter is largely free to use, I can disable the ads., and I recognise that it’s not a democratic space, so I treat it accordingly, but the feeding of nonsense to more gullible people than I is something that perhaps needs to be balanced out somehow. It’s my contention that Twitter will collapse in on itself in the end anyway, because even now it’s beginning to look like a bit of a cesspool.

Should that happen, I wonder where the crazies would go?