Twitter Gamifies Communication. Here's Why That's Alarming

The hidden cost of commodifying conversation.

Adapted from a paper I wrote for an epistemology seminar at Williams.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, limits, and justification of knowledge. It asks questions like: How do we acquire knowledge? How is knowledge different from mere belief? What are the limits of what we can know?

Communication (whether through speech, writing, gesturing, or even tweeting) is how we share knowledge; it therefore sustains collective understanding and cooperation. So when communication breaks down on a global scale — as seems to be happening lately — we risk losing our ability to understand one another, and by extension, to work together to address the critical issues of our time. We become fragmented, polarized, and less knowledgeable overall.

Which is why it’s so concerning that much of our public discourse is now mediated by platforms which dilute the quality of communication by turning it into a kind of game, as philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues in his 2020 article “How Twitter Gamifies Communication” (see also this fantastic lecture).

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with games proper, which can be fun, educational, and even therapeutic. In soccer, chess, or wordplay, players willfully acknowledge that they are taking on largely arbitrary goals for the sake of play, for the simple thrill of exploring alternative agencies, for the calming effect of those simple, pre-prescribed goals (however difficult they are to achieve in practice).

Crucially, though: as soon as the game is up, normally players give up trying to get the ball into the net or checkmate the opponent’s king. They understand that, in Nguyen’s marvelous words, even the most devastating “Yo mama” jokes don’t necessarily convey “reliable testimony about the state of the world” — nor are they supposed to.

When Nguyen refers to gamification, however, he’s pointing specifically to a process whereby the more meaningful objectives of our ordinary activities are obscured by simple, quantifiable metrics. Gamified activities, like games themselves, have clear markers of success and failure, but since they’re attached to objectives that are fundamentally unquantifiable, they often fail to capture the full complexity and value of the activities they're meant to represent.

In (ordinary games), players willfully acknowledge that they are taking on largely arbitrary goals for the sake of play, for the simple thrill of exploring alternative agencies, for the calming effect of those simple, pre-prescribed goals (however difficult they are to achieve in practice).

This disconnect between metrics and real-world value is evident in many aspects of modern life. It’s generally understood, for instance, that “[a] high step count isn’t the same as good health” and “a high GPA isn’t the same as a good education”. After all, we can easily imagine a person, say, running in circles all day, supercharging their step count while neglecting sleep and nutrition, or achieving stellar marks on an exam through rote memorization of information without ever logging it into medium- or long-term memory. Just as step counts and GPAs aren’t the same as health or learning, “high Twitter Likes aren’t the same as connection or collective understanding”. We should therefore be careful not to let simplified proxies become substitutes for the real-world values they purport to represent.

Okay, but how does gamification make communication worse? While Nguyen states that Twitter's metrics negatively impact our normal communicative aims of connection and shared understanding, I want to focus on the epistemic dimension – the 'shared understanding' component, whether it be factual knowledge about states of affairs or a deeper understanding of one’s conversational partner’s situation and perspective.

Of course, not all communication is epistemically oriented. Other common aims of communication include storytelling, creativity, or amusement as in fiction writing or entertainment, and pragmatic transactions as in demands or negotiations. But the kind of communication I want to focus on, the kind of communication that Twitter undermines, is of a distinctly epistemic kind. Let’s call it Truth-Oriented Communication.

Truth-Oriented Communication is especially visible and pronounced in professional contexts like academia, medicine, journalism, etc., where a prime imperative is to improve the epistemic situation of some or all participants. Think of a scientific panel discussion aimed at educating the public on matters about climate change or public health, an investigative journalistic report intending to uncover truths related the inner operations of a corporation or political campaign, or a civil political debate geared towards finding the best policy solutions rather than simply scoring points. Such activities are Truth-Oriented because their primary aim is to produce or transmit knowledge – which, as has been widely accepted by epistemologists, carries truth as one of its necessary conditions (in the sense that a proposition obviously cannot be a piece of knowledge if it is not true). Of course, these activities might have additional aims as well, such as promoting justice and fairness, facilitating transactions, or motivating specific actions. Still, their foundational commitment to truth is inalienable.

Much (though certainly not all) of our everyday communication falls under this category of being Truth-Oriented. From asking for directions to catching up with a friend to seeking advice from a trusted mentor, communicative partners often aim to convey truthful information, gain clarity on the facts of a particular situation, comprehend others’ viewpoints more accurately, etc. From casual chatter to professional contexts, the distinctive features of Truth-Oriented Communication are that:

1. All parties are on the same team in the pursuit of knowledge and collective understanding. The aim is not to win, but to improve our collective epistemic position.

2. Intellectual humility is displayed by all parties, involving a genuine willingness to reconsider their positions and a critical yet open-minded stance to novel or contradictory information.

These virtues of cooperation and intellectual humility are essential features of Truth-Oriented Communication. Personally, I think of them as ‘ends in themselves’ — things which we should value for their own sake. But they’re also necessary conditions for improving our collective epistemic position. Without them, we can’t make meaningful progress towards bridging the gaps in our collective understanding of each other and of the world.

Twitter advertises itself as a platform for Truth-Oriented Communication. In November 2022, then-CEO Elon Musk tweeted that “Twitter needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission.” That same month, a blogpost by Twitter’s team proclaimed that “Twitter’s mission is to promote and protect the public conversation – to be the town square of the internet.”

Even before Musk's takeover, Twitter was viewed as force for overall epistemic good. Users and developers alike widely saw the platform as a neutral, democratic, and highly convenient medium through which to carry out the ordinary Truth-Oriented Communication that happens offline anyway. As Nguyen writes, “The majority of Twitter presents itself as, and is taken to be, ordinary discourse. For the most part, we think that people on Twitter are representing their real beliefs and trying to make claims about the actual world.”

Even if we accept that Truth-Oriented Communication is Twitter’s intended function, it can now hardly be denied that the self-proclaimed digital town square has become more like a digital Colosseum, awash with a torrent of misinformation, competition, trolls, and hate speech. Even before Musk’s takeover, Twitter was notorious for its toxicity, with founder Jack Dorsey tweeting in 2018: “We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers. We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough.” It is clear that the communication Twitter in fact facilitates is of an utterly different kind than its creators claim it does, or at least claim it should.

Twitter is not neutral. Nor is any medium. But Twitter is particularly damaging to Truth-Oriented Communication. This is because its core design features incentivize Gamified Communication, which:

1. Encourages a “winners vs losers” outlook to discourse, replacing civil debate with fiery arguments and “gotchas” — discourages cooperation.

2. Rewards confidence over humility. Thoughtful consideration of other views is considered a weakness.

As Nguyen argues, the problem with gamifying ordinary activities is that it persuades us to replace our original “rich, subtle, and hard-to-express” values with strikingly simplified proxies, diluting the very nature of the activity. In Twitter’s case, users sign on “for the sake of communication, connection, and shared understanding and [come] out obsessed with maximizing Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts”. Reliance on Likes, Retweets, and Follower Counts as proxies of successful communication encourages individuals to abandon the epistemic virtues of cooperation and intellectual humility in favor of fierce competition and partisanship. Again, the loss of these epistemic virtues is a harm unto itself, but it is particularly concerning as it makes Truth-Oriented Communication all but impossible.

[G]amifying ordinary activities […] persuades us to replace our original “rich, subtle, and hard-to-express” values with strikingly simplified proxies, diluting the very nature of the activity."

Gamified Communication is epistemically harmful because it incentivizes participants to abandon the epistemic virtues of cooperation and intellectual humility, which in turn causes them to miss out on the epistemic goods involved in Truth-Oriented Conversation. It diminishes individuals’ characters and worsens our collective epistemic position.

To see how this might play out, consider a Twitter user – let’s call her Elena – who signs up in the hopes of becoming more knowledgeable about politics. Having heard that Twitter is the new town square, Elena feels it is her duty as an informed citizen to engage with the platform. While originally, she seeks factual information and thoughtful, nuanced discussions about hot-button issues of the day, Elena quickly notices that good-faith discussions receive very few Likes and Retweets compared to quippy and/or inflammatory remarks. She also notices that those with high follower counts tend to post pithy, divisive statements rather than dry factual information. Nguyen outlines three ways in which Elena might choose to interpret these metrics:

First, Elena could treat Twitter as a genuine game, taking on its goals temporarily for the sheer thrill of gameplay. Second, she could keep its metrics at a motivational arm’s length, treating them only as an incomplete proxy for some other valuable end. Finally, and most dangerously, Elena might internalize Likes, Retweets, and Follower Counts as genuine markers of successful epistemic exchanges, thus confusing Gamified Communication for Truth-Oriented Communication.

Given that Elena’s primary motivation to join Twitter was the pursuit of truth, we can rule out the first option: it’s unlikely that she would so painlessly shift gears to using Twitter merely as a game. Out of the latter two options, our knowledge about human psychological tendencies suggests she is more likely to go for the third and most dangerous one. It is simply easier on the mind to blindly adopt prefabricated, crystal-clear values than it is to keep these fabrications at arm’s length and stick true to one’s genuine, but more complicated, values.

Over time, these metrics erode Elena’s epistemic virtues, programming her to abandon the aims of cooperation and intellectual humility. As Twitter’s intentionally distracting and coercive design coaxes her to spend more and more time on the platform, she loses sight of her original, Truth-Oriented goal entirely. She participates in and pays more attention to rhetorical battles where the main aim is to demonstrate the superiority of one’s own position. She overlooks opportunities to challenge her own biases, understand other perspectives, and improve her understanding of the issues. Elena becomes less cooperative and more competitive; less humble and more arrogant. On a larger scale, the corrupting influence of Gamified Communication on Twitter makes discourse more tribalistic and more disconnected from the subtle pursuit of truth and wisdom.

Gamified Communication is not unique to Twitter, or even to our digital era. Philosophers have long been worried about the distinction between epistemically helpful and harmful forms of communication. The Greek philosopher Plato framed it as a distinction between philosophy and sophistry. He saw philosophy as the reasoned pursuit of wisdom and knowledge and sophistry as using deceptively persuasive rhetoric to win arguments. Plato saw Sophistry as “an apparent but not genuine branch of expertise in making money from apparent but not genuine wisdom." (Sophist, 268c).

Today’s online communication platforms are churning out modern-day Sophists at an alarming rate. Except while the Sophists were after money, today’s most dialed-in Twitter users seek Likes, Retweets, and Follower Counts. Gamified metrics like these are such powerful motivators because they’re so simple and objective. They’re clear. But they’re poor measuring sticks for deeper, more enduring values. The values we’re really after.

As they say, recognizing the issue is the first step towards addressing it. By being aware of how these platforms shape our communication habits, we can strive to maintain our commitment to truth and understanding, even in digital spaces. This might involve consciously prioritizing thoughtful engagement over viral content, seeking out diverse perspectives, and remembering that the true value of our interactions lies not in quantifiable metrics, but in the genuine exchange of ideas and the collective advancement of knowledge.

For more thoughts on mitigating the harms of digital technology use while maximizing its benefits, check out my article “Web 3.0 is Coming. Are You Prepared?”