INDEED: Twitter isn’t real.

What if Twitter isn’t real?

By that, I don’t just mean Russian bots talking to other Russian bots, liberal satirists fooling gullible conservatives, and cynical opinion-mongers conjuring panics out of nothing. There’s clearly a lot of literally fake news on Twitter, and it’s a problem.

Notwithstanding these flaws — or perhaps because of them — Twitter is still taken seriously as a medium. It’s supposed to be extraordinarily powerful and influential, able to make and break reputations at unprecedented speed.

But what if it isn’t? What if Twitter is mostly a closed ecosystem, relevant only to and within itself? What if its ability to shape the real world is, as they say, greatly exaggerated?

#BringBackOurGirls wasn’t exactly a smashing success.

Related: Social Media as Social Disease.