Certain elements of the way twitter worked encouraged this fighting particularly effectively. Quote tweeting (especially for tweets out of context) was often used for purpose of inviting widespread harassment of someone whose opinion someone and and their followers did not agree with. This was especially true of internal organizational spats; the success of those posts depended on how may impulsive, emotional reactions one could draw from the right framing of the quoted tweet.

We like to rail against social capital or think that we are immune to that feeling of being popular (or agreed with) and thus having even a scintilla of power can have on us. The truth is we live in a time where very few of us have any power whatsoever (as individuals) to begin with, and because of this, those feelings of affirmation and righteousness are extremely alluring, even though in the grand scheme of things they're pretty much an illusion.

Twitter exploited the emotions of power and popularity felt by isolated individuals, and, as a website cleverly designed to give us a quick endorphin rush for every ❤️, they were very successful at it. However, this highly encouraged if not outright gameified isolation and empowerment of the individual is antithetical to real leftist organizing and frames all conflicts (within and outside of organizations) as conflicts between individuals, cleverly obscuring and derailing the collective struggle.

even when multiple people shared the same side of a political disagreement, these conflicts were framed as being between "right" and "wrong" individuals, & thus became highly personal. If 2 people disagreed on prison abolition vs reform, that disagreement was not hashed out in a legitimate, good faith way; often someone on one side qt'd someone on the other out of context, saying something like they "love cops" and inviting their followers to issue a targeted, personal attack on the qt'd person

the shield of online anonymity and the allure of social capital takes a legitimate political dispute and atomizes it. Meanwhile, the way twitter works, other people who were not already involved (eg other leftists) or were only tangentially related (liberals dunked on by leftists) get a whiff of this unfolding drama (now broken up into out of context replies/showing up based on who faved it) and the whole thing brews into a drama that's completely derailed from original politics of the dispute.

This is how legitimate political disagreements devolve into statements like "greg loves cops and is a cop fucker" or "sophie is a lifestyle anarchist." Twitter's evisceration of context and its opening of what we falsely assume to be closed conversations is a form of breakdown of the signifying chain. It makes it impossible to build a cohesive (much less collective) narrative outside of the pseudo-populist and horribly rigged context of who has the most likes and retweets (social capital)

Finally, the soul of left twitter disputes weren't even over political disagreements to begin with but were more so constant competitions of being "leftier than thou." This competitiveness often made those looking to get ahead in the social capital game engage in techniques like searching into others' digital pasts in search of problematic content and treating the retweeting a Louis CK tweet in 2008 as being evidence of that person condoning sexual violence in 2018.

In conclusion, the main fallacy at the heart of left twitter and its exploitation by the forces of capital was that likes and retweets were equivalent to units measuring how just or correct one was as opposed to how just or correct another leftist was. Twitter was extremely effective at equating social capital with feelings of righteousness. Because the act of fighting for justice was pushed onto the conflicts of individuals, many leftists completely lost track of their collective goals.