While using Twitter this weekend I witnessed a couple of debates between various Twitter users that I follow.  Leaving people and personalities aside, I don’t think that Twitter is a very good platform for debates.

  • The 140 character limit really causes problems.  You’ve either got to make your point in 26 words or less or else continue a conversation over multiple Tweets which tend to get lost if you have a number of people in your timeline.
  • In some cases, I believe that people’s responses were compressed to making a “sound bite” that would fit into the 140 chr. limit.
  • The ability to adequately explain a point of view was just not there, particular if anyone watching the debate didn’t understand or appreciate the full context of the conversation.
  • Regardless of intent, a number of comments were perceived to be ad hominem arguments, at least in part due to brevity (again, my opinion) and word choice

The thing is, Twitter provides a forum that a lot of people can participate in and thus, if nothing else, it has a share of attention that could be used to have debates of this type.

Maybe it would be worth creating a Twitter debate guidelines document of some kind.

Does one already exist?  I’m going to check this out.


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