A few times in my life, a clear and decisive thought has manifested in me like a light turning on or like land appearing on the horizon before an exhausted ship’s crew. Each time, the thought materialized into something like an audible command, cutting through any confusion or ambivalence I felt. The earliest instance of this I can remember brought about the end of my first romantic relationship (more of a one-sided infatuation on my part, if I’m being honest). It happened after the second or third cycle of my girlfriend’s cheating followed by her tearful apology. Two words surfaced in me loud and clear: I’m done. And just like that, I was.
The identical words surfaced again the other day while I was scrolling my timeline on Twitter. I’d flirted with leaving Twitter before, taken breaks, set limitations using screen-time settings and browser plugins. But I could feel that this time it was different. I really was done. I know I’m part of a Twitter-exodus bandwagon, though I honestly can’t say whether this feeling was connected to the Musk takeover and what he has been doing there, nor can I say objectively that my actual Twitter experience had become any different than before.
If you read my last series of posts, you might be surprised to know I was still on Twitter at all. It’s true that I ditched Facebook long ago, barely adopted Instagram at all, and as an ad-driven service, Twitter is subject to the same bad incentives as those other platforms. Nonetheless, I continued to get value out of it. I’ve been on Twitter since 2008 (14 years!), although I’ve only really been an active user for the last five or six. In that time I’ve curated what feels like a truly wonderful list of people and profiles to follow, while accumulating only a very modest following of my own. On Twitter I have greatly enjoyed the musings of artists, comedians, teachers, sports commentators, and other smart people. I get updates from organizations I admire for their work in the world. I also follow a diverse collection of regular folks, strangers who crossed my radar in various ways. On a whim at one point I searched my relatively common real name and followed every single person I found on Twitter who shares it. That bloc alone includes a body builder, Christian country singer, black female army veteran, an obsessive college football fan, and lots more. Twitter overall has been fun. It’s just that more and more of the political and cultural commentary there feels toxic.
Maybe the algorithm was favoring the toxic stuff in my timeline more than it used to, or maybe it’s a function of the times we’re living in, but anyway, whatever the reason, last week I was feeling the toxicity more acutely than usual. The ripe mix of cruelty and stupidity this time was in the wake of the recent Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs. Again, I don’t know if anything has objectively changed on Twitter itself, but it feels like we may be witnessing an inflection point on the right, which I observed on Twitter as a split between the usual “thoughts and prayers” crowd and something much darker. Even the thoughts and prayers crowd was differently on the defensive this time, seemingly aware of how some themes of their recent anti-LGBTQ rhetoric (groomer slurs and whatnot) could have contributed to radicalizing the shooter. “How dare you blame us” was the general take.
As for the darker side of the split, I saw a shocking number of tweets celebrating the killings and otherwise trying to logic their way through arguments about how LGBTQ folks themselves have been asking for it, or why the world must be rid of homosexuals and trans people. I know these people have long existed out there because I’ve run into them from time to time, but they have existed at the extreme margins of conservative circles if they have been connected to the conservative movement at all. And to be clear, I’m talking about the people who feel emboldened to actually spew this kind of hateful rhetoric in a public setting. I’m well aware that plenty of people hold similar beliefs but have tended to censor themselves. The candidacy and then presidency of Donald Trump activated a lot of the people at the margins, and thus emboldened, their prominence and influence has grown steadily over the past few years. More and more of them, including Trump himself, started saying the quiet part out loud, and now it’s not even clear that conservatives believe there is a quiet part.
The last straw for me with Twitter was the prevalence of a particular video in my feed – showing the Club Q shooter’s father, a self-proclaimed devout Christian, declaring how relieved he was to learn that his son was present in a gay bar as the murderer and not as a (gay) patron. Honestly I didn’t watch the video, so I’m basing my understanding of its content on how it was summarized by so many people who shared it in tweet after tweet. The video itself is an awful artifact of hate and ignorance, and to be fair to the people who shared it, they were motivated by a sense of outrage. Nonetheless this had the effect of spreading the video as well as providing fertile ground for some truly appalling commentary in the replies.
Even before the appearance of this particular video, I shared with my wife how upset I was to see people celebrating the Club Q killings, and she was incredulous. And I mean she was literally incredulous in the sense that she was not aware that these goblins existed at all, and nor could she imagine such people. She had expressed similar incredulity a couple months ago when I made a passing remark about fragile caucasians earnestly explaining why the Little Mermaid can’t be black. There have been more instances like these, and they all point to the fact that my Twitter experience is a bubble, an increasingly toxic bubble of my own choosing. It’s not real life, though for me it has served as a useful, often delightful, lens on real life. And then on Thanksgiving day, all at once it felt like that ended for me. I was done.
The so-called Irish goodbye has always been my preferred method, and that’s what I did. Almost immediately after those words surfaced in my mind – “I’m done” – I deactivated my Twitter account. I left it that way for a couple of days, but then I started to think about the handful of people I interact with there exclusively whom I will truly miss. So I reactivated my account just to pin an official goodbye tweet to my profile page. My current plan is to leave that up for another week or so, and then deactivate my account for real.
I suppose it’s possible I’ll buckle and sign in again. In theory I could spend a few hours refining the list of profiles I follow, to better filter out all the political and cultural commentary and make Twitter a better experience. I don’t think that will happen though, because I really feel done with it.
As for Twitter alternatives, I’m taking a look at Post, if you want to find me there.
Terrific piece as always. I hope you feel the JOMO that I feel being off of Twitter and get added joy from knowing that you’re yet another enlightened person making a conscious vote against the structures of the modern social internet. Even if nothing truly springs up to “replace” Twitter there is much to be said for simply reading, enjoying and not sharing beyond the limits of our own heads, or only within a trusted circle of friends and family. We did it this way for millennia and unlearning newer habits, as I’ve found, has been remarkably easy.
I'm going to ride out Twitter. 75% of its user are international, not American. I joined to keep up with science communication, so I just block right-wing stuff if it annoys me. The Twitter disability community is unique, as well. There was a good Time magazine article recently interviewing some disability activists on how the democratic nature of Twitter can't really be reconstructed inside siloed platforms like Mastodon. The intersection of MedTwitter and DisabilityTwitter comprises, for example, sufferers of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome approaching doctors treating Long Covid with attempts to work together. Twitter has been the place where ground-zero news from coups, protests, etc., are first aired, in attempts to reach mainstream media reporters. I was on Twitter when the first Burmese people posted videos of the government crack-down in Myanmar. In fact, I suspect that Musk's takeover and failure with Twitter could have a chilling effect on human rights protests--another reason why I want to stay and fight for the platform. If Twitter goes down, many important voices of resistance will be silenced. I also suspect that the rich and powerful would like this. As part of a marginalized group, with friends in other marginalized groups, I don't have the privilege of retreating into a bubble. I want to be on the front lines, digitally at least. Yes, it requires a lot of self-care to balance it out. But I lived in a bubble for far too long and have no desire to go back.