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Twitter cliques might feel like high school, but their existence is tied to our human nature

It will come as no surprise to anyone, but I was not cool in high school. Not even a little bit.

Now that I'm a 30-year-old human masquerading as a grownup, I had hoped I'd put my desires to be part of the cool crowd to bed long ago. But years after this angst-ridden festival of self-consciousness, I have become uncomfortably reacquainted with the feeling of being on the outside of the clique.

Over a decade since I put high school well and truly behind me, I now inhabit a virtual one. And I'd be lying if I said that I don't feel a pang of those teenage feelings — of thinking I'm on the outskirts of Cool Town — anytime I scroll through my Twitter feed.

I'm talking about Twitter cliques — those sub-communities of people who often have large followings, who pile into each other's mentions, and who seem to have a niche sense of humour that's unique to their own clique sub-culture. To outsiders, they can feel like kingmakers, Somebodies, powerful industry peers, or even just people you want to be friends with.

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Motherhood blogger Emily Beatrice says she's found the realm of mummy blogging to be full of Twitter cliques. "I would reach out to other writers and be ignored," Beatrice says. "It’s very much like high school; everyone trying to get to the top, by either stepping on others or sucking up to those they deem more powerful." Feeling excluded from these groups made Beatrice feel "insignificant and not good enough — as though I would have to change who I am to fit in with them."

Beatrice decided to start the #OtherMothers community for mothers who also might have felt excluded in the same way. "#OtherMothers is about women supporting women regardless of differences in opinion, class, race, or religion," she says. "White middle class privilege online limits the view we have of motherhood and women in general."

Image: vicky leta / mashable

As someone who is, in all honesty, a little bit insecure, Twitter amplifies the existing things going on inside my mind. Like, what if no one laughs at the funny thing I have to say? What if people find me really annoying? What if people witness my joke not landing and judge me? Róisín Lanigan, junior editor at iD magazine, shares some of this sentiment.

"I literally always feel this way with groups of writers who seem to all be super talented mates. I'm always like, afraid to follow or engage with them a lot in case they're like, 'Who is this loser?,'" says Lanigan. People on Twitter thinking "Who is this loser?" is a worry that has crossed my mind on more than one occasion, too.

According to psychology academics, clique formation is actually not unique to our high school experiences — the existences of Twitter cliques boils down to our human nature. Dr Michael Muthukrishna — assistant professor of economic psychology at London School of Economics — says this "tendency to form in-groups and out-groups" is a core part of human nature. Not only that: this part of us long outlasts our teenage years. Robin Dunbar — professor of evolutionary psychology at University of Oxford — tells me that clique formation is "a natural pattern" for us which "remains a feature of our social world throughout life."

Oh cute you’re in a twitter clique? Blocked.

— J🌻 (@childofthewild7) March 22, 2019

"According to our research, we typically make friends with people who are most like us (those who share our opinions and interests)," says Dunbar. In his research, Dunbar has identified that followers of a Twitter account "exhibit exactly the same pattern of groupings in their online conversations with each other as in the face-to-face world." This means there are strong parallels in the way humans interact with their IRL friends and their Twitter pals. "They have the same layered structure with the same numbers — an inner-inner clique of 1-2 [users], an inner clique of about 5, a less intense clique of about 15, and so on — with the same contact frequencies," Dunbar explains.

One thing that we all know from our own experiences of being in friendship groups in real-life — be it in high school, the workplace, or elsewhere — is that we usually tend to feel loyal to that group. LSE professor Muthukrishna uses the example of "arbitrarily chosen high school sports teams" and the "willingness to compete for your side at the expense of the other."

Researchers have studied this "willingness to form groups, favour in-groups, and discriminate against out-groups" using something called the Minimal Group Paradigm — a method used in a laboratory to artificially create social groups. "This [tendency] falls under something called social identity theory or ethnic psychology (where ethnic just refers to small groups that have a mini culture unto themselves)," Muthukrishna says.

i hate twitter cliques all they do is gang up on people and have That Attitude

— 🧁 (@honeyplort) March 18, 2019

So, why exactly are we so loyal to our friendship cliques? Well, the answer is complicated.

"The simplest way to put it is that we are an unusually cooperative species — our closest cousins, chimps, don't cooperate anywhere near as much as we do," says Muthukrishna. "In reality the greatest successes and the worst atrocities are the product of individuals co-operating in groups to some end."

Clique forming — whether IRL or on Twitter — is a fundamental part of our human nature and, therefore, something that is unlikely to change. At the very same time, it's important to acknowledge how exclusionary and alienating our online behaviour can be to other people — and the ways we can work to change it.

Just as parenting blogger Beatrice turned her negative experience of cliquedom into a way to find and build a more welcoming community, there are stories that show another, more positive side of Twitter's community spirit. It's important to note that while Twitter is full of groups that feel impenetrable and highly exclusive, it can also be a place where people find positive, supportive, and mobilising communities that rally together to affect social change.

Black Twitter is one such community. Feminista Jones characterises #BlackTwitter as "a collective of active, primarily African-American Twitter users who have created a virtual community" and used their collective force to bring about "a wide range of sociopolitical changes." This community has since been praised for its role in "focusing the nation’s attention" on the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

Twitter has the ability to unite for good, but, as many of us are painfully aware, it also has the capacity to divide for bad. Though we're hiding behind computer screens and phones, we're human beings, and our human traits are mirrored and amplified through social media. Being cognisant of that will undoubtedly serve all of us well.

WATCH: Twitter turned this massive fried rice prank into a pretty great meme — All the Memes

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