So Long Twitterland

It's Time We Began to Laugh and (Not) Cry

After some weeks of preparation and much longer thinking about it, I’ve finally deactivated my Twitter/X account and joined the exodus to Bluesky. This ends a period in my digital life that began in 2011. I initially joined Twitter at the instigation of my former agent, who suggested that this was a novel way in which we writers could get ‘exposure.’

I’m not sure how much exposure I ever got for my writing, but Twitter certainly exposed me to a new world I hadn’t realised existed.

Unlike some of the users who are now abandoning it I have no nostalgia for the golden age of Twitter. I always found the platform disturbing, alarming, and often enraging. It consistently brought home to me, in a way that that nothing else has, that the moral universe I thought I belonged to was not the one that many other people were living in.

Freud made the point more than once that individual moral choices are always dependent to some extent on social norms and the approbation of our peers. In that sense, Twitter was a kind of anti-Freud space where the Id seemed to have kicked the superego into the long grass.

It was a place where people (insofar far as I knew) could engage in rampant dishonesty, and say the worst, the cruellest and the nastiest things that came to mind without, for the most part, without any consequences or repercussions, beyond the loss of their accounts.

These tendencies weren’t limited exclusively to the right and the far-right, but it was these sectors, as we now know to our cost, that made the most effective use of Twitter and other social media platforms, and used these networks to ‘flood the zone with shit’, as Steve Bannon memorably put it.

Friends would sometimes ask me what was the point of inhabiting a world like that, as if Twitter was some kind of irrelevant distraction from political or social normality or serious political discourse.

It’s true that most people you meet in the flesh don’t usually behave in the way that they might do on Twitter, but that didn’t mean the platform was irrelevant. For the last thirteen years, it had provided me with a mostly unfiltered ringside view of the extremist politics that have been ravaging one democracy after another over the last thirteen years.

Again and again, it made me painfully aware that twenty-first century politics is being shaped by forces that are mostly ignored or marginalized by the celebrity presenter breakfast show, Newsnight or Question Time formats through which mainstream political conversation is conducted.

On Twitter, you saw twenty-first century political life raw in tooth and claw: the gaslighting, the hatred, the bullying, the sexism and racism, the gleeful pile-ons, the vicious shit-stirring, the conspiracy-theorising, the trolling and the victimization of the vulnerable. You saw how utterly mediocre rightwing ‘influencers’ and provocateurs amassed huge followings through saying the unsayable - the unsayable mostly meaning the worst thing they could think of to get the outrage and the clicks.

You saw how (in) famous and lesser-known political grifters skilfully used the platform to shape agendas and promote themselves. And all this unfolding on a global scale.

This was often depressing, but it was also morbidly compulsive. Many times, I would find myself wondering, can this be real? Do people like this really exist? Only to discover that it was, and they did.

But negativity wasn’t the whole story. Twitter could also be funny, heart-warming, quick-witted and downright hilarious. I learned a lot from it. If Twitter was the place where I discovered monstrosities like David Vance, Katie Hopkins, Bernie Spofforth and Ben Shapiro, it was also where I discovered Chris Grey, Sangita Myska, Clare Hepworth, Russ Jackson and many other followers and people I’ve followed, some of whom I still connect with on Bluesky.

Twitter was a place where you could feel part of international communities of like-minded strangers, in a world where such communities are increasingly absent. It definitely wasn’t a safe space, but it was a space where you could extend and sometimes receive affirmation and solidarity; where you could observe political events unfolding in real-time, and hear perspectives that you are not going to get from Laura Kuenssberg or Robert Peston.

It was also a place where you could respond to what was being said, and there was a time when I often did, and not always politely. There is a reason why I was blocked by the likes of Alison Pearson, Andrew Neil or Daniel Hannan.

I didn’t abuse or bully, or instigate pile-ons, but I wasn’t respectful to people who were not worthy of respect.

What did I accomplish through these interactions? Probably not much, beyond the ephemeral satisfactions of calling out lies, disinformation, bigotry or racism, in a public forum.

I used Twitter - possibly too much - as a political outlet, in a time of political despair. I vented, wrote threads, shared and re-shared. I entered conversations that were probably best avoided.

This was not always good for my productivity, because Twitter, like so much of social media, can easily become the thief of time. To paraphrase Neil Postman, you can end up scrolling yourself to death, when you could be doing better things. Or else you could find yourself arguing with people over subjects that can’t easily be discussed in 140 or 280 characters.

So why am I leaving it? The answer can be summed up in two words: Elon. Musk.

Because Twitter was always a forum for disinformation and misinformation even before Musk acquired the platform in 2022. But under Jack Dorsey, there was at least some content moderation. Death threats were usually out. Racial hatred and vicious sexist insults were out. Twitter’s notion of ‘community standards’ often seemed lax to me, but at least they existed. Twitter did take down the accounts of Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate, Katie Hopkins, and Donald Trump, to name but a few.

The Fall of the House of X

And then the World’s Richest Man took over the platform and brought the scrapings of humanity back, and all this in the name of ‘civilization’ or the ‘future of humanity’, or whatever other pompous terminology Musk thought made him sound profound.

And since that happened, the little blue bird no longer tweets. And Twitter has become a howling wilderness where names like ‘Tommy’, ‘Farage’, ‘Trump’ and ‘Elon’ and other defenders of civilization, appear on your ‘For You’ feed from the moment you wake up.

There is now almost nothing that anyone can say that will get them taken down, and no troll so malignant that Musk’s now-miniscule regulatory team won’t accept them. As if a sewer pipe has burst somewhere, the platform is flooded with porn bots, trolls, Nazis, and fascists.

And who can be surprised, when the man who owns the platform behaves like a sneering troll himself, and boosts the algorithms of his own company to make sure that his own startlingly ignorant, vicious and/or idiotic tweets trend?

If this is civilization, give me the barbarians any time.

Since Musk took over, I’ve also noticed that I no longer connect with the people I used to connect with; my own followers are draining away for no apparent reason, my tweets get almost no engagement.

It’s a dark magic, and I don’t even begin to comprehend it.

But I, like many people, began to wonder what was the point of being there. Especially when Musk coolly attempted to trigger ‘civil war’ in the UK by enabling disinformation about the Southport riots, and then doubling down on it in his own tweets.

And what has the Labour government done in response to this?

Not much. Starmer & co appear as mesmerised by rich people as Tony Blair’s governments once were.

No one familiar with Peter Mandelson will be surprised that the front runner to become US ambassador has urged the UK to get over its ‘feud’ with Musk, and ‘kick it into touch as soon as possible.’

Sorry, but when a billionaire attempts to incite ‘civil war’ and allows some of the worst people in your country to harm some of its most vulnerable communities, that is not a ‘feud.’ When the same man attacks your government’s policing policies, and calls you ‘two-tier Keir’, that man is not ‘feuding’ with you.

Back in August, when the Labour government declared - rightly - that it would ‘not tolerate attacks on mosques or on Muslim communities’, Musk responded with an alt-right talking point: ‘Shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on all communities?’

At the time, the government described the riots as ‘organised illegal thuggery which has no place on our streets or online.’ Musk was crucial to that ‘online’ element, but Mandelson - a politician who never saw a rich man he couldn’t get on with - has urged Starmer to use Nigel Farage as a ‘bridgehead’ to Musk and Trump!

This is not statesmanship. It is not political skill. It is not even realpolitik. It is shameless pandering to someone who despises you and wants to destroy you.

In October, Technology Secretary Peter Kyle tried to play the same game, by declaring himself ‘slack-jawed’ with amazement at the ‘staggering achievement’ of one of Musk’s booster rockets, and said that if Musk opens an investment fund in the UK, ‘I will be first in queue to knock at his door to see if we can get it here into Britain.’

One can’t feeling that something more than this is required to fight the political forces that Musk has helped unleash. The semblance of a spine or moral backbone would help.

Because how has Musk responded to all that sycophancy? By supporting a petition for a new election in the UK, on the utterly spurious and nonsensical grounds that Labour is presiding over a ‘tyrannical police state.’

And now Trump has won the election, in part, because of the money Musk invested in him, and because of the platform that Musk gave back to him.

Such practices represent a clear and present danger to democracy, and the unwillingness of my government and so many others to make Musk and his tech bro cohorts accountable is the most disastrous and shameful cowardice. And that is one more reason why I left Twitter. Because my presence there now feels like complicity. I don’t condemn those who have decided to stay. Nor do I expect Musk to lose much sleep over my departure.

I’m aware of the dangers of living in echo chambers, but I see nothing more to be gained or learned from X. I’ve heard enough. At the end of Seven, Detective Somerset quotes from Hemingway, and says, ‘“The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for”. I agree with the second part.’

Spend enough time on Twitter/X, and you won’t even agree with the second part.

And so I have abandoned Musk’s house of horrors, along with so many others. I hope it collapses, like Poe’s house of Usher, and that I too will one day look back as the ‘deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Twitter.’

Though unlike Roderick Usher, Musk has probably got what he wanted from it, and will now go on to wreck the US government, even as my own government prostrates itself before him.

But now I’m enjoying the Bluesky thinking. I don’t know if it’s an echo chamber, but it feels calmer, and the digital air smells cleaner. It’s less crowded, but that doesn’t bother me, because it’s actually a relief to come across so many people who don’t make me ashamed of my species.

They remind me that our world - despite the evidence of Twitter and the sociopathic troll who ran it into the ground - is a fine place and worth fighting for.