Circa Now : Nasty Comments on Twitter

When Bill Clinton appeared on Stephen Colbert’s television show in early April, Mr. Colbert expressed surprise that he didn’t have a Twitter feed. Mr. Clinton said he didn’t tweet because he’s “sort of insecure.” So Mr. Colbert set up an account (@PrezBillyJeff) and had the former president dictate his first tweet to him. Mr. Clinton added that he was worried he would attract no followers, saying, “There’s nothing worse than a friendless tweeter, right?” (He needn’t have worried: an hour after the episode was broadcast, he had 20,000 followers.)

My point: if a household name capable of instantly drawing a crowd is concerned about looking like a loser on Twitter, think of the burden felt by the average Joe. In a milieu rife with self-promotion and self-branding, the inevitable byproduct is insecurity. Insecurity is to bad manners as boat travel is to nausea.

I joined Twitter in February to give myself a daily deadline for writing jokes. But soon the demon of success started breathing fire in my ear. “I don’t have enough followers,” I soon started thinking. “I need to twitter-blitz or to set fire to a small dog.” I felt as if I had shown up at the Oscars in a tux by Giorgio Armandi.

The first piece of wisdom I gleaned was unanticipated. Namely, Twitter fact-checkers are an unforgiving bunch. In March, shortly after Senator Rob Portman of Ohio reversed his position on gay marriage because he has a gay son, I wrote the tweet, “Senator Rob Portman doesn’t have another son who’s poor and 87 and in need of health care, does he?”

When Andy Richter, the actor and writer best known as Conan O’Brien’s sidekick, re-tweeted the joke to his 452,000 or so followers, one response I received was a veritable tasting menu of bad Twitter manners, combining as it did fact-checking (one) with undermining (two) and blame (three). The response ran, “an 87 year old son? @billmaher made that same joke, only funny. thanks for nothing @andyrichter.” Trifecta!

But the most egregious expressions of insecurity on the site, of course, are nasty comments. If Twitter is an excellent shopping mall full of boutiques offering specialized news and wit and opinion, it is also a crowded barroom that bristles with a certain kind of white male rage.

This rage, marked by a hostility toward anything poetic or naïve, reaches its full expression in the comments directed at Jose Canseco’s feed, a highly pleasing outpouring of slightly oddball, gnomic pronouncements. When Mr. Canseco, the baseball player, wrote, “I have blown up bigger engines than the diesel,” one of his followers wrote, “Jose, I think you’re an absolute moron.” Mr. Canseco’s tweet “north korea do the math” drew “I’m also very familiar with mental illness.”

But you don’t have to wield a cudgel to exhibit insecurity; I, for one, turn all my anxiety inward. Every time someone re-tweets one of my jokes, it sets off a spate of fretting about reciprocity.

If the person is a total stranger whose feed I do not follow, then I will look at this feed and consider climbing aboard. I’ll look at the ratio of how many tweets to how many followers that person has: if it exceeds 10 to 1, then I may suddenly feel shy. Because this person is unknown to me, I will feel no compunction to re-tweet a post of hers, though I may be tempted to “favorite” (the equivalent of Facebook’s “like” button) one.

But what if the person who has re-tweeted me is someone I know? Suddenly the pressure mounts. I’ll proceed to follow her, of course, if I don’t already. Then I’ll start feeling very guilty if I don’t re-tweet one of her posts.

Occasionally the disquiet caused by scanning an acquaintance’s home page for a reciprocal re-tweet can escalate. Mr. Richter said: “Sometimes I just cannot pull the trigger. Then I’ll bump into that person in the real world and they’ll compliment me for my tweet. That’s like saying, ‘I saw your jail video on the Web!’ ”

Further complicating these bouts of anxiety about reciprocity is that they tend to happen in clumps. Like other activities rooted in the nonessential (finally reading that back issue of The Economist, say, or trimming difficult-to-reach hairs on your person), Twitter is at its most compelling when you are trapped in an airport hotel in Tulsa. You’ll write 10 tweets that night, two or three of which will catch fire, drawing traffic. This traffic will want managing. You’ll wake up the next morning and discover you’ve got some thank-you letters to write.

Henry Alford is the author, most recently, of “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That? A Modern Guide to Manners.” Circa Now appears monthly.