If I pretended to hold just a third of the political positions I hold, any one of those thirds would probably have me at 3 times the followers from political Twitter.
I wonder if this explains the dismal quality of political Twitter somewhat. Are people really just pretending?
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I'm not suggesting my positions are Good and True, but I wonder why so many people have such predictable and limited opinions.
On some level, it feels like they can't possibly be real. People almost never hit this level of declared internal consistency in other areas of life.
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I feel like it stems from the need to Brand everything
accounts that have a single, instantly-recognizable Brand are a lot easier for people to slot into their mental filing system, and thus they don't have to spend a lot of brainpower determining how to interact
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I think the trick is: people are ego-identifying with (and expressing) what they'd Like to believe (internally consistent) but they're often not examining what they Do believe
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not necessarily intentionally pretending, but unable to express ego-dystonicity
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people who care enough to primarily tweet about politics probably do have very formed and fairly consistent beliefs. It's important to them, if it wasn't, politics wouldn't be their main thing.
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That is my impression of *some* of them, for sure, but is not exactly the sort of demographic I was referring to.