Why I (finally) left Twitter
“You should totally sign up, it’s a great way to meet people and swap puns.”
It was 2008 and a friend was trying to convince mid-twenties me to sign up to a new social media platform called ‘Twitter’ on a night out. I was skeptical. Sure, I’d been hearing a fair bit about it on the London blogging circuit, but — ever-cautious and resistant to bandwagons — I’d decided against jumping on board up until that point. There was something about it that felt a little bit…unknown for my liking.
It wasn’t like I was against social media as a whole, and I was already using Facebook and MySpace. But there, you knew exactly who was seeing your posts. Sending messages out into oblivion with no control over who would be reading them felt terrifying to me. What if I inadvertently said the wrong thing? What if someone at work disapproved? What if, what if, what if…
But, that night, under the influence of a fair bit of booze, I finally caved in and created an account. After all, I was new to the capital and had friends to make. My first tweet was so benign it’s not worth repeating here. But I was off. Straight away I made a bunch of fun connections. And I did indeed swap a lot of puns. It was a nice thing and I liked it.
Then I started a new job at the Guardian as a spokesperson, and Twitter immediately became a vital tool for my job. I could monitor what people were saying about the newspaper, get ahead of reputational issues and I was even asked to present to the company about the benefits of Twitter for comms teams.
So, for work, it was great. And for my personal life, it continued to have its upsides. Through this platform, I could share snippets of my weird mind that seemed to resonate with people who ‘got’ me like no other form of communication had managed before. It felt good to connect with people this way, and I even got a few dates out of it. But it did come with a few backhanded slaps along the way, like the time someone I believed I was seeing announced ON ACTUAL TWITTER they had a new girlfriend who definitely wasn’t me. Ouch.
But, on balance, I was sold. It helped my job, it helped my personal life and, within a couple of years, I’d built a solid following of a couple of thousand and all seemed well.
But it didn’t take long for me to spot a few patterns that didn’t sit right with me. Firstly, I noticed that the more I used Twitter, the more anxious I would feel. Having all these deep insights into people’s minds was fascinating at first. But it quickly got overwhelming, especially when their experiences and thoughts weren’t positive ones. All the noise of everyone’s pain would lodge itself inside my brain, and I couldn’t help but feel it all intensely as if their struggles were my own. In an attempt to quieten the noise, I unfollowed people I cared about, but that only made me feel worse.
On top of that, there was the negative attention. Working as a public face of a high-profile media organisation meant that I would often become embroiled in online arguments and would get tagged in posts to try and trip me up into saying something I shouldn’t. I knew this was part of the comms business, but playing professional mind games has never interested me, so I regularly locked down my account until everyone had moved on to another scandal. Others seemed to relish this kind of attention, feeding off it, somehow. But, to me, it felt intrusive and exhausting, as if I was losing control of my privacy.
Then there was the lack of nuance. Two types of posts seemed to be able to ‘cut through’ on Twitter as time went on: those that were almost voyeuristically uplifting (why would you *film* a good deed?!) or those that were absurdly outrageous. Hyper-good and hyper-bad tweets got bumped up the algorithmic feed with interaction, likes and retweets. The space for thoughtful contemplation and subtlety got smaller and smaller until it was absorbed entirely by the two extreme ends of the scale. There was no point in quietly questioning anything anymore, and my many attempts to communicate how the platform was manipulating and warping our thinking and emotions didn’t just get dismissed but, somehow worse still, got completely ignored.
And, of course, there was the Very Big Thing. Tr*mp. By this point in 2016, my brain was a muddled mess of fury and confusion. I’d had a baby and I’d left the Guardian, yet my Twitter feed was still a melting pot of increasingly horrific breaking news and bleak political analysis. I couldn’t decide whether Twitter was compounding the downward spiral of democracy, or had caused it in the first place. Probably both, actually, like a self-perpetuating cycle of destruction.
And it dawned on me that, up until that point, I’d become reliant on Twitter for continuous, micro-reassurances. But all I was getting now was continuous, micro-uncertainty. I hated it. And, on the night of the election, I switched off my phone and went to bed, unable to take any more worry.
“Only wake me up if it’s good news,” I instructed my family.
Well, we all know how that ended.
The day that the USA elected the demagogue, I switched my news alerts off, locked down my Twitter account and reflected deeply on what I was getting out of this site anymore. Honestly? Nothing. Worse still, the nature of its algorithm had also directly resulted in the election of a megalomaniac.
For a while I logged out, and I even de-activated my account a couple of times. But each time I returned, concerned that I was missing out on opportunities and connections, especially when I started to harbour ambitions of becoming a published author one day. But no one was interested in my weird and critical musings anymore. They were all addicted to outrage and ridiculousness. And to the dopamine hits that ‘doing numbers’ gave them.
Oh look, there’s that word: ‘addict’. And, yes, Twitter had become an addict’s game, I realised. And I was one of them. The 6 January insurrection? I talked about leaving as an act of digital defiance — an abandoned platform can’t be used to spread lies and hate if no one’s there to listen to them— but still I stayed.
But things are different now. For me, with a new owner whose seemingly insatiable appetite for narcissistic input is now being met on a mass scale, a line has been crossed. I can sense where this is all heading and I don’t want to be a part of it. Leaving the platform feels like the most radical and powerful thing I can do.
But here are all my vital privileges that have enabled me to do this:
I have deep relationships that exist outside of social media.
I have a permanent job, so I don’t rely on Twitter for work opportunities.
I’m not physically disabled, so it’s easier for me to network and connect in person compared to many others.
Yes, I’m sure I’ll pay a social and professional price for losing certain connections. But, when it comes down to it, I can socially and materially afford to leave. Many can’t. And that’s why everyone’s tolerance lines are in different places.
Fourteen years after I joined Twitter, I’ve now left for good. It felt nice to join back then, but it feels right for me to leave now.
Ultimately, the question I keep coming back to is this: how can I expect society to progress and change if I’m not willing to make affordable sacrifices for it?
Price paid. Onwards.
