Progressives Driven by Social-Media Echo Chamber

Here’s a take: The online spectacle currently being staged by Felicia Sonmez and some of her colleagues at the Washington Post illustrates in microcosm the growing threat that Twitter poses to the fortunes of America’s progressive movement, and to the institutions that the movement has taken over bit by bit.

There are many good things about the Internet’s relative lack of gatekeepers, but there are also a great number of circumstances in which it can hurt, rather than help, users. Absent social media, there would be no forum in which a figure such as Felicia Sonmez could have performed her bizarre little show. Where, in, say, the 1990s, could such a demonstration even have occurred? She could not have stood on her desk in the Post’s offices and shouted for five days straight. She could not have behaved as she currently is in the opinion pages of a newspaper, or on the evening news. I suppose she could have walked erratically around a public park muttering to herself — but, if she had, she would not have had a band of maladjusted sycophants telling her she was correct.

CC

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Charles C. W. Cooke

Charles C. W. Cooke is a senior editor at National Review and the host of The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast.

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Here’s a take: The online spectacle currently being staged by Felicia Sonmez and some of her colleagues at the Washington Post illustrates in microcosm the growing threat that Twitter poses to the fortunes of America’s progressive movement, and to the institutions that the movement has taken over bit by bit.

There are many good things about the Internet’s relative lack of gatekeepers, but there are also a great number of circumstances in which it can hurt, rather than help, users. Absent social media, there would be no forum in which a figure such as Felicia Sonmez could have performed her bizarre little show. Where, in, say, the 1990s, could such a demonstration even have occurred? She could not have stood on her desk in the Post’s offices and shouted for five days straight. She could not have behaved as she currently is in the opinion pages of a newspaper, or on the evening news. I suppose she could have walked erratically around a public park muttering to herself — but, if she had, she would not have had a band of maladjusted sycophants telling her she was correct.