“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” ~Mark Twain

When a pro-Taliban Twitter feed bragged that a recent roadside bombing had killed eight coalition troops, Lt. Col. Stewart Upton, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force’s Regional Command Southwest, was quick “to debunk the claim. He tweeted: “Wow! 8 killed, don’t you think there would be some type of announcement from ISAF? how was your poppy harvest?”

Wait a minute. Waging social media war? In Afghanistan? This is a thing now? How will this strife end? Block the Taliban? Report them to Twitter staff for abuse?

I am relatively green to Twitter. I had settled into Facebook like a Kafka-esque beetle under a pile of dust. Facebook status updates are pressure enough without being judged by random followers. Now the threat of imminent ‘twitter war’?

Twitter War.  A sprawling, digital Cold War which has no purpose other than building notoriety in a fruitless one-upmanship to infinity. I knew a dude who would one-up everyone in his immediate vicinity. If anyone talked about their adventures or accomplishments, he would have done it a million times better, at warp speed & under much more brutal conditions. If you were having a heavy menstrual flow that particular day he would out-period you — he was that #winning.

Entire careers are based on monitoring, and responding to, what happens in this Twittery world of sentence fragments. The first day I came in to work I was amused by the relentless attention to tweets (as the determiner of click-throughs and ultimately, ad sales). I was even more amused by the jibes and the ‘twitter wars’ – short but caustic disputes in a very public forum. Being relentlessly ‘on’ is enough BS in real life. Being on for a bunch of faceless Internet followers is exponentially worse. Why do people enjoy these terse, short-lived exchanges? Why not channel this energy into drinking heavily and playing Internet Scrabble? But then, I am a type-B personality so deathly afraid of confrontation that I fear any Twitter war could trigger a RL aneurysm.

I don’t dispute the upsides to Twitter.  It means quick, easy dissemination of important information that can be delivered in a relatively egalitarian fashion (i.e. expediting the Arab spring). The flipside is the human tendency towards status whoring and attention seeking: rising to the creamy top of the twittercesspool.

Celebrities, seeking social validation and support, will persist in these ridiculous exchanges. In olden times (six years ago), we were mostly preserved from the thoughts of celebrities. They seemed eminently more composed and graceful.  Now we have outfitted them with unfiltered, 24-hour megaphones for their first-world grievances. Watching this ticker tape of idiocy unfold is the equivalent of eavesdropping from a dirty nightclub bathroom stall at 1:30 am on a Saturday.

Case in point – every single one of these. Pay attention to what happens to your body as you read them. The abbreviations trigger instant brain cell death. Their childish retorts ratchet up dopamine production. Nicotine-level craving for more embarrassing personal details. Nausea. Repeat. These military officials and politicians and celebrities should blow off steam through ultimate frisbee or whatever horrible activity it is that people do for exercise nowadays.

That said, I’ve come up with a foolproof strategy for defusing a twitter attack and preventing all out war:

Turn it off.

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Tiffy Thompson is a writer and illustrator for the Toronto Standard.  Fight her (please don’t) on Twitter at @tiffyjthompson. 

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