Abstract
By any measure, the most widely read thing that I’ve ever written was a tweet—one that registered over 10.9 million “impressions,” a statistic that captures the number of times an individual tweet appeared in readers’ Twitter timelines or search results. That eclipses my most downloaded paper ever by a factor of . . . over 7000. And although that tweet was not especially scholarly (unless you teach grammar, in which case you might even think that it was wrong), I spend much of my time on Twitter attempting to provide substantive legal content on matters within my academic wheelhouse—for instance, close and careful tracking of the Supreme Court’s so-called “shadow docket.” Although I also use Twitter for (most) of the bad reasons (Let’s Go Mets!), my principal use is to share news, legal analysis, and my and others’ scholarly ideas. The question is whether, for professional purposes, that’s all anything other than a frolic.
Forests have already been felled on the perils of being an academic on Twitter, including the possibility that, without an edit button, we might cause harm to our reputations by writing something either blatantly incorrect or substantively objectionable; the absence of the intellectual rigor that characterizes more classical forms of scholarship; and, perhaps at a more banal level, the sheer time that it can take away from nobler professional pursuits. These concerns are quite real. But going by my experience, at least, there are also at least three significant upsides that are also worth weighing for those debating the virtues and vices of being an academic on social media in 2021.
First, if nothing else, Twitter is a great forum for drawing attention to professional work that might be less visible on its own. When I finish a paper, publish an op-ed, or file a brief, I’ll contemporaneously tweet a URL link to the underlying document along with a brief summary. It’s possible for sufficiently motivated individuals to find (most of) these things on their own, but Twitter dramatically reduces (and accelerates) that effort. And “retweets” by others, whether with or without an endorsement, can further increase that visibility. For instance, I first posted a draft of my November 2019 Harvard Law Review essay on “The Solicitor General and the Shadow Docket” to SSRN on July 15, 2019. I tweeted about it immediately after doing so. Within a few hours, the paper had hundreds of downloads—and I think I can safely say that it’s not because hundreds of people were crawling SSRN on a random Monday in July. Later, the draft of the paper was cited by Justice Sotomayor in a dissenting opinion in September 2019—two months before it was published. Twitter was the only place that her chambers could have seen the draft. And although that example may be extreme, more mundane variations recur on a regular basis.
Second, Twitter is also a great way to network—within a field; across fields; with reporters writing about your fields; and, as especially relevant to a law professor, with state and federal judges and policymakers. Professor Ryan Whalen annually documents the “Law Prof Twittersphere,” which, among other things, includes a visualization of the networks that law professors on Twitter have with each other. Many of my connections are people I’ve never met. We communicate through Twitter, whether publicly, through direct messages, or both. There’s no corresponding public visual for other forms of Twitter networking, but it’s definitely there.
Finally, beyond elevating work or helping to network, the tweets themselves can have an impact. During the Trump administration, I would often publish tweets or Twitter “threads” to respond to controversial actions taken by the government; conspiracy theories originating from the flanks; or stories that, if true, seemed to raise serious legal questions. The threads were meant not as pointers to longer-form scholarship (although they sometimes included them), but to provide quick-hitting substantive material on their own, whether by providing the applicable language of a statute; flagging relevant judicial decisions; or walking through why particular arguments were or were not convincing. These tended to be widely read on Twitter. But more importantly, I’d often later hear that they’d been read and discussed by the relevant government actors, as well.
It’s not all good, of course; with such increased public attention and interest comes stunningly toxic (and, in a few cases, disturbingly personal) trolling. And I try hard to not be oblivious to how much easier it is for someone with my profile—a tenured, white male professor at a major research university—to shrug off such abuse in contrast to (far too many) others. But perhaps the most important lesson I took away from Twitter during the Trump years is that, while there are far too many trolls and bots, there are also thousands (if not millions) of people who are turning to social media in a genuine (if not always successful) good faith effort to better educate themselves. And we can help.
On January 20, 2017 (the day that President Trump entered office), I had just over 7,000 Twitter followers. Four years later, on the day he left, I had over 153,000—and well over a billion “impressions” in the interim. My colleagues, most of whom eschew Twitter, are of the view that all of this is completely irrelevant when it comes to the tenure process (which, fortunately, is long since behind me) and our annual reports (which unfortunately are not). I’m biased, of course, but I’m not so sure. Except perhaps for poets, 280 characters isn’t scholarship. But for those scholars whose fields provoke or are adjacent to significant public discourse, the last few years drive home that tweets can be a lot more than “nothing” where professional impact is concerned. For someone who’s always assumed that having an impact on intellectual discourse should be one of our central professional aspirations, that’s a big deal. That, and tweeting the perfect GIF.