Learning to Tweet with Talib Kweli, the Master of the 140-Character Shutdown

About five years ago, Talib Kweli got a text from Questlove urging him to join a new website called Twitter. Kweli had heard of Twitter, but he was puzzled: Why did he need to be on Twitter? No, you don't understand, Questlove said. The way that you write lyrics and the way that you like to debate—you need to be on Twitter.

Today, there is perhaps no Twitter user more tenacious and fluent in the art of the Twitter debate than Talib Kweli. Go to Kweli's Twitter page and you'll see him fielding questions about Black Lives Matter, Islamophobia, homophobia, the KKK, the portrayal of women in hip hop music, the casting of Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone, Iggy Azalea, and so on. He quotes every one of his interlocutors, so that both sides of the debate are public. His replies are eloquent, fierce, and rapid-fire—if you catch him in the middle of an argument, you'll see him blast out many tweets a minute.

Basically, Questlove was correct.

"He was brilliant for telling me that because he was exactly right," Kweli told Motherboard. "I love to write, I love to debate, so Twitter is, for someone like me, just a perfect medium."

Kweli's doggedness was interesting to me personally because I find Twitter to be a very fun, but also very scary place. Because it's so easy to set up a Twitter account and start yelling at strangers, and because that yelling is forced into 140 character bursts, it tends to be a good place for yelly people to get their aggression out by directing it at specific human targets. It occurred to me that it might be possible to have a constructive debate on Twitter, but that it would take far more patience and dedication than I could ever muster.

Kweli enjoys arguing with people on Twitter. (His brother is a constitutional lawyer, so it seems the art of rhetoric runs in the family.) "Twitter is like sparring to me," he said. "It's the guy on the basketball court doing suicide drills."

Beyond that, he finds he does sometimes change people's minds. After a weeklong discourse on the ethics of corporal punishment, he estimated about 20 people told him they'd changed their minds and would no longer hit their kids. "If 20 kids are not getting beat this week because I decided to be a bastard on Twitter, then it's worth it for me," he said.

And at the same time, by speaking out on Twitter and getting attention, he's able to promote his music and direct people toward his website, he explained.

On this week's Radio Motherboard, Motherboard editor in chief Derek Mead and I talked to Kweli about what's going on in his mind when he engages in these fierce Twitter debates. I also spoke to a few members of the Twitterati, including Wirecutter's Casey Johnston, Buzzfeed's Katie Notopoulos, and SoundCloud's Catt Small, to get some insight into when it makes sense to talk to people, when it makes more sense to mute them, and when it's justified to use the block button.

Show notes:

1:12 Adrianne has 532 people blocked on Twitter.

1:40 Casey Johnston, editor at the Wirecutter, checks how many people she has blocked.

2:23 Katie Notopoulos, senior editor at Buzzfeed, scrolls through her blocklist.

4:58 "If someone blocks you, you won. You got under their skin. You made them go to the principal and complain about it."

8:50 Catt Small, game developer and product designer at SoundCloud, on her decision not to use the Good Game Autoblocker to block more than 10,000 users at once that were suspected of being affiliated with Gamergate.

10:20 Small: "You have 140 characters per tweet. What are you going to say?" Kweli would disagree.

11:30 Enter Kweli. The track that's playing is "Every Ghetto," from the album Indie500.

13:30 "I think with hip hop artists, rappers in particular, we take to Twitter like fish to water because it's set up where you have to sort of get your thoughts out in 140 character bursts, and that's sort of the same amount of space you have for two bars. So I think rappers, or lyric writers, are always thinking in couplets anyway, and thinking how do you convey something that's heady and deep, or something that's complex, in a simple way. And Twitter is a great exercise in that."

18:40 Many of the people who try to argue with Kweli on Twitter would not make Debate Club. Anecdotes are not evidence.

24:55 "I change people's minds all the time."

31:05 Kweli versus Bomani Jones of ESPN:

@bomani_jones I get you from ATL and I like @BigBoi too. But @ me with the shade next time. U can have a preference w/o the disrespect.
— Talib Kweli Greene (@TalibKweli) July 27, 2015

36:20 Creating a character on the internet is sort of like creating a character as a hip hop artist, but it takes a lot less work. Kweli doesn't have a character: he's himself in his music and on Twitter.

39:20 Kweli breaks down who he thinks his followers are. "I have people who follow me that are Trump supporters."

42:03 Kweli tells us about the last person he blocked on Twitter.

42:45 Responding to your detractors doesn't necessarily discourage them, but it can make you feel empowered, where just blocking them to try to silence them often means their words float around in your head for weeks.

47:15 Twitter is still, at the end of the day, a marketing tool for Kweli.

50:40 Twitter offered Kweli a tool to sort through his mentions and he declined. "That would defeat the whole point for me. If I'm only seeing certain tweets, that might as well stop. What I've built in my Twitter, organically, is that I'm engaged."

55:57 That's our show! Thanks for listening.