‘This Is How Rats Work.’ Why Twitter’s Emphasis on Follower Counts Could Be Backfiring

Online follower counts have become a fashionable form of currency, numbers people use as evidence of personal and professional clout. Media outlets treat it as news when celebrities amass big followings, and an entire industry has ascended around “influencers” who endorse goods via popular feeds. It’s a metric increasingly ingrained in modern life. It’s also under the microscope at Twitter.

CEO Jack Dorsey has expressed a willingness to rethink not just policies but the platform’s fundamental design as Twitter continues to grapple with issues ranging from hate speech to disinformation campaigns. The company’s “singular priority” is increasing the health of conversation on the platform, Dorsey said over and over during a recent grilling on Capitol Hill. And, he added, features like follower counts — along with prominent buttons for likes, retweets and replies — may be giving users counterproductive “incentives.”

What incentives are those? That he was less specific about. But academics who are trying to understand the effect that social media is having on human behavior have some ideas: While such features are no doubt rewarding, for users as well as Twitter’s bottom line, experts say they may also be contributing to a culture of mindless outrage and making people more susceptible to manipulation.

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