Breen: Twitter and Its Potential Dumbing and Numbing Effect on MMA

Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company, Evolve Media.

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Twitter on Wednesday marked the 12-year anniversary of its founding. I don’t think I need to explain to you that this social media platform has transformed global communication, culture and, more specific to our purposes here, MMA to a profound degree. How fitting that Tuesday’s hottest story in the sport was a frivolous four-way bitch-fest between Ultimate Fighting Championship welterweight Kamaru Usman, his manager Ali Abdelaziz and fellow 170-pound contenders Darren Till and Jorge Masvidal.

The most avoided fighter in the ufc today @USMAN84kg everyone’s talking shit but I’m talking to the matchmakers daily - masvidol said no, Magny said no, Covington said no, thompson injured, Darren Till saying he wants to fight but no contracts coming through pic.twitter.com/nA1fNI7R59

— Ali Abdelaziz (@AliAbdelaziz00) March 20, 2018

I’m sorry mate, truth is I’m scared of you! At 100% I could imagine you to be a monster so fuck that shit. I’m scared of wrestlers! And your striking is great aswell! Weird that you called out Colby after your last fight and not me tho #UsmanTheTwitterTalker

— Darren Till (@darrentill2) March 21, 2018

I’m a bitch who will come to rip your fucking head off, you will fake to want to fight with me and try to shag my leg off... I am finally ready to get over my fears and fight you. You beast! @seanshelby #UFCLiverpool

— Darren Till (@darrentill2) March 21, 2018

You must be as 2 faced as people say you are for posting this with my name in it. Lets see I’ve agreed to fight #1 at the time Maia, #2 at the time Thompson now I’ve been offered #7 Till which I more than welcome cause it’s a dude that actually fights and doesn’t run his mouth https://t.co/yNnX9Xmawy

— Jorge Masvidal UFC (@GamebredFighter) March 21, 2018

Now, I was unaware of March 21 being Twitter’s birthday until the day itself. However, in a bit of serendipitous coincidence, I spent a large portion of my radio show on Tuesday discussing how social media has changed MMA discourse. Simply, I was caught off-guard by how much post-event email the happenings at UFC Fight Night 127 in London generated, as well as several other topics like the forthcoming UFC 223 card and even things like Bellator MMA’s ongoing heavyweight tournament. Many of the emails went well beyond a standard short question or two designed to be read on air, some of them being longer-thought essays and even a bit of wordy catharsis. They were, for all intents and purposes, people opening a dialogue. This surprised me and made me nostalgic in a way, since it reminded me of the sort of emails I more frequently received from listeners and readers five to 10 years ago.

Initially, I was simply pleasantly surprised and charmed, even if I was cognizant of what informed my surprise and spent time on my show explaining how the nexus of MMA discourse and conversation has moved from popular online forums to Twitter and, by the platform’s nature, has altered fans, fighters and media’s relationship and engagement to the sport. However, after having been forced to read the Abdelaziz-Usman versus Till versus Masvidal fiasco, I’m more nostalgic than ever.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to raze and destroy MMA Twitter or the platform on the whole. In many capacities, Twitter’s popularity and idiosyncratic use in this sport has had a slew of positive benefits. It’s a brilliant self-promotional tool for athletes, fans and journalists; its multimedia richness can be both entertaining and educational, allowing people to be exposed to personalities, topics or fights they may have otherwise never seen; and in many ways, it has streamlined the experience of fight night, combining community conversation with news and media items in a one-stop shop. However, these are only positives when its actors are at their best. I feel now more than ever that there’s a legitimate question about the extent to which these traits are net positives, as they all have pernicious, lurking drawbacks.

Take the value of self-promotion. If you work in MMA in some capacity, fighter or otherwise, Twitter is almost a necessity. We know the extent to which it has been for the UFC, for instance. Going back to Semaphore Entertainment Group and Zuffa-era ownership of the company, the UFC has always sought to use the Internet to take the temperature of fans and gauge the direction of its product. Even if I’m almost certain they were rigged, Pride Fighting Championships would routinely use online polls from fans asking them what fights they wanted to see in the next rounds of annual grand prix events. However, the nature of MMA’s call-out culture, combined with promotional mandates for fighters to be popular and extreme online influencers, is how we get irritating and silly exchanges like the one between Aziz, Usman, Till and Masvidal, if not outright engendering the modern “fake news” conundrum, as fighters and their managers routinely use the platform for misinformation and propaganda that can poison the well.

This construction of false narratives and reality is almost inherent to the medium. Consider this: In May 2011, the UFC was lauded for its vision as a company for announcing that every three months it would hand out a slate of $5,000 bonuses for those fighters performing the best in a variety of social media categories. However, the program was canceled almost immediately in the wake of former World Extreme Cagefighting champion Miguel Torres’ now-infamous “rape van” tweet and the discovery that many fighters, most famously Roy Nelson, had either purchased an enormous number of followers or that their accounts were mostly filled with fake or inactive followers. A Ingrained Media report in 2013 estimated that 62 percent of their studied MMA fighters’ followers were either fake or inactive. Again, there is a level of artifice and misinformation that proliferates with promotions, and it’s worse when you consider the very real promotional opportunities that may be lost by athletes who actually have an honest Klout score.

This is not to say Twitter can’t be a powerful promotional tool. In 2016, media analytics firm MVPIndex appraised UFC lightweight champ Conor McGregor as the fifth most valuable athlete on all of Twitter; by 2017, he was No. 1. “The Notorious” one no doubt makes brilliant use of social media. However, McGregor was already a star before earning those plaudits, and the enormous amount of leverage he wields over his own promoter imbues his tweets and the like with a different level of potency, making his social media accounts a must to follow just to try to decipher a clue about what he may do next. Conversely, no matter what wild things he types or how good he is at Photoshop, Twitter is not really going to help Colby Covington suddenly turn into a champion that can sell 500,000 pay-per-views or more. Twitter is an echo chamber; just because Derrick Lewis’ brand of online humor is hilarious doesn’t mean many fans or non-fans are going to buy a pay-per-view as a direct result.

To the echo chamber event, this is part of what helps poison the discourse at large. I mentioned Lewis, who I think is an essential social media follow for MMA fans; but I follow him because I enjoy his antics and sense of humor. I follow Sage Northcutt because I enjoy how surreal his posts are, like an unwitting parody of how inoffensive, “Gotta thank my sponsors and my team!”-type fighters act on Twitter. However, I choose to follow them and try to avoid most of the thousands of fighters posting pictures of their meals and family photos. Who knows what I could be missing? While Twitter may work great, MMA or otherwise, for aggregating your interests and the subjects related to them, in this sport, it cheapens discourse.

When MMA discussion existed nearly entirely on forums, you by necessity needed to confront unpopular, unfamiliar or upsetting people and ideas. On Twitter, you can avoid them, filter them out and block them. If you want to engage with someone or something that upsets you, you’re fundamentally hamstrung by a 280-character limit. They say brevity is the soul of wit, but it’s also the soul of glibness and misunderstanding. Even with the character-limit doubled, it’s simply fundamentally harder to have an enriching or informative conversation on Twitter due to the constraint. In turn, it makes people more reliant on .gif replies and memes, on duplicity and insincerity. A conversation is like tennis; there’s a natural back and forth exchange. Now imagine a world where a tennis point could never be longer than five strokes. How enjoyable or thrilling would tennis be? When forums were the dominant medium for MMA discussion, whether you liked or disliked what someone had to say, if they posted an essay, you were almost certainly going to read it, lest you be a “tl/dr” sort of clown.

The nature of multimedia on Twitter can be confining, too. Even the hardest of hardcore fight fans now are more likely to watch a short video clip or animated .gif of a fight finish, rather than sitting down to watch a full card. This is only exacerbated by the fact that even diehards have less time to consume more MMA now, simply because of the sheer volume of product online and on television, especially the UFC, with its oversaturation and ambitious annual schedules having an almost anesthetic, numbing effect on fans, fighters and media. The process of scrolling through endless Twitter beefs between fighters, fight clips, journalists hocking their latest wares … at some point, it just washes over you and you find yourself not caring. As beneficial as Twitter has been in a variety of ways for the sport, it amplifies many of MMA’s most cynical and detrimental qualities.

The march toward the newest, hottest technologies of the future will never stop, and eventually, those technologies will change us all. MMA, a sport that during its Dark Ages lived online and was incubated there, will always be a sport full of lead users and early adopters. With that said, we must always be thoughtful in how our sport’s culture evolves, lest we get a little more dumb and a little more numb.