Parody Twitter accounts have more freedom than you and I ever will

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/18/parody-twitter-accounts-more-freedom

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In our rightfully paranoid age, there are a lot of people writing about data security. But out of all the experts you could track on social media, 76,000 people follow @SwiftOnSecurity, an account purporting to be Taylor Swift discussing cybersec. Because once you get past the setup, @SwiftOnSecurity has important contributions to make.

SecuriTay (the account’s current display name) is part of an unsung elite of novelty Twitter accounts: the joke or meme that became something much more serious. These gifts from the internet find the mask of humor liberating and evolve something greater than their origin anecdotes.

Fronting as a parody allows the anonymous tweeters behind these accounts to evade social media’s self-appointed gatekeepers: the proud trolls, the racists and misogynists, anyone who thinks “free speech” means they get to shout others into silence. A particularly wonky tweet that included a photo of the singer from @SwiftOnSecurity, for example, netted the response, “that looks like a man’s bulge in the crotch of those pants”.

But who cares? A real woman might be rattled by an attempt to body-shame her rather than engage with her ideas, but that’s Taylor Swift’s body, not @SwiftOnSecurity’s, and Taylor-actual-Swift is likely not reading that tweet. People are free to punch on SecuriTay, but she’s going to make an unsatisfying, hollow thud. Unless you engage with her ideas, you’re wasting casual sadism on a decoy.

Even if you’re not a troll, culturally we tend to be more suspicious and resistant to ideas from “marked bodies” – people who differ from the white, straight able-bodied male we’re trained see as the default. They tend to get the most prominent platform. But novelty accounts use dummy bodies, which allows these accounts to be considered for what they say rather than who is saying it.

Or, as @RealAvocadoFact would say:

People seem to respond less harshly to feminist ideas when they come from an avocado than from a woman just an avocadobservation

@RealAvocadoFact, which recently went on hiatus, was my favorite parody account dropping actual knowledge. It has dispensed actual avocado facts (its advice on checking for avocado ripeness – pop off the stem and look for a golden color – changed my life) and lobbied for Unicode to add an avocado emoji.

But it’s also weighed in on capitalism, patriarchy, racism and government surveillance. Despite a fruit’s side-eye, those are all still going strong, but at least one battle is won: the avocado symbol is a candidate for inclusion in an upcoming Unicode version. “I hope any eventual avocado emoji will become a symbol for, among other things, ending capitalism, stopping police brutality (via abolishing police and prisons?), preventing the erasure of the experiences of the subaltern, and delicious snacks made with avocado”, @RealAvocadoFact emailed me.

I asked Avocado whether tweeting as an avocado gave it more freedom, since fruits are genderless. “Unspeakable freedom!” it replied, “which immediately carries with it a lack of real connection to anything.” That lack of connection acts as a useful buffer – anyone who gets angry at an avocado looks absurd, Avocado pointed out to me – but it also means there is less at stake. Avocado can comment on the world it sees, and its commentary carries weight because of its outside perspective. But at the same time, it is not of that world.

Of course, the brain behind Avocado is in fact a human one. (In fact, it’s several human brains. After several years of being run by a single anonymous author, @RealAvocadoFact became an aggregate fruit.) But on the internet, nobody knows you’re not an alligator pear. Even as we strive to be vigilant against catfishing and spambots, we tend to take things online at face value – treating people differently based on their avatar, for instance, or sharing that photo of the Kentucky Fried Rat even though it’s an obvious hoax.

By presenting as a fruit, the humans behind @RealAvocadoFact gain that alien authority, deniability and detachment. By presenting as a teen idol, Infosec Taylor Swift takes on some of her glitz (not to mention exploiting the implied disconnect between Swift’s image and cybersecurity). By presenting as anything other than what they are, novelty accounts gain – well, novelty. And ideas that might otherwise have been overlooked or shouted down get a new sheen.

This is not to say that we should all be saving our most valued insights and posting them as bears or tablecloths or Gary Oldman. A Twitter crewed solely by fake celebs and fake non-humans would be Mardi Gras, all masks and no consequences. But sometimes, the safety of a fictional persona can paradoxically access a deeper level of truth.