Deleting Twitter
Filed under: life | social media
You read the title, let’s get to it.
I’m seriously considering deleting my personal Twitter account because I’ve had enough of the place. It started in 2020 with the BLM protests and the influx of unwanted attention, DMs, and people thinking they were helping but were making it uncomfortable to exist online. Pleas to be left alone were regularly ignored, diversity lists started popping up, requests for talks and then the sheer volume of tweets I just couldn’t stomach: quote tweets of the worst kind of people and takes, and when you blocked them, you’d see screenshots instead, traumatic images and videos, it was relentless.
And then Elon Musk bought Twitter and it somehow got worse. Now, it’s utterly horrendous and full of hatred, transphobia, right-wing propaganda, and Nazism in every kind of way. And people are getting paid to do it, with people engaging with it despite being told not to.
I feel for the people involved with grassroots organisations who had built networks to people fighting fascism now losing those connections and having to be subjected to it all with little-to-no means of combatting it on the platform.
So I’m contemplating deleting my account. A big part of me wanted to write this to hold myself accountable rather than thinking anyone reading would care. Anyone close to me has contact with me elsewhere and anyone who’d “miss” me could have spoken to me at any point up to now. I’m reachable if you know where to look. As to when I might do this? I dunno. Soon? I’ll have to think about that too.
Update (5/11/23): Today, I deactivated my Twitter account deactivated and downloaded my archive. In 30 days, it’ll be no more.