Tweet no more
I joined Twitter in 2006, an early adopter. I encouraged my friends to sign up, and endured numerous “What is this for?” kinds of questions. In the early days, Twitter was less good about recommending people to follow, so signing up left you with a sense of being in the lobby of an empty restaurant.
Over the years, I slowly curated a list of people who I followed and after about a decade, my feed was something I looked forward to viewing. I was more a lurker than an author on Twitter, but I wasn’t silent either. Just a normal, non-viral user who enjoyed the platform.
Then, on October 28, Elon Musk purchased Twitter, and it quickly proved to be as bad as I’d expected. I thought it was the most responsible thing for me to leave. I deleted over 3000 tweets and closed my account permanently, never looking back.
This post is not to promote the numerous Twitter alternatives. They exist, but like Twitter, I think any one of them will require some months or years of individual effort to “garden” into something approaching what formerly existed on Twitter.
No, instead, this post has two goals:
- Encourage you to leave Twitter
- Encourage you, and those who have already left, to convince others to also leave
These goals stem from the behavior that Musk has already revealed as captain of the ship:
- He is encouraging hate speech to exist without moderation.
- He has allowed nazis and white supremacist accounts to be reactivated.
- He reinstated the account of insurrectionist disinformationmonger Donald Trump.
- He’s disabled journalist accounts that he disagrees with.
- He’s spreading antivax memes from his own account. In late November, for example, Twitter said it’s no longer enforcing a policy of combatting Covid-19 disinformation.
- He’s undermined trust by selling “blue checkmarks” at discounted rates without the vetting usually given to accounts with this privilege. A flood of fake accounts predictably emerged.
- Content moderation teams have been fired wholesale.
- Never mind the mass departures and firings from Twitter, which has a fraction of its former staff in place.
As a result, trolls are running rampant with hate speech, doxxing their perceived enemies, and disinformation is spreading more quickly. The platform has always had a toxic side, but now there are no checks to it.
Why should you delete your Twitter account?
As the saying goes, “if you aren’t paying for an online service, then you are the product.” Advertiser costs are based on aggregated user counts; fewer users means that advertisers will see the platform as less desirable. This was my primary reason to leave. I cannot justify giving value to Elon Musk’s Twitter. Being an inactive user isn’t enough—the user count will still show me.
The next level of value that my account’s meager existence brings to Twitter: my tweets and metadata. “I’ve never tweeted anything that is private” isn’t the point to this. All your likes, all your retweets, the list of people who you follow and the list of followers all have value as data to Twitter. How often you sign in. How many (and what) tweets you click on, which videos you watch. All data. All valuable.
Deleting your account might not entirely remove access to this metadata; it may already be aggregated or archived anyway. But, deleting your account does prevent new metadata from being added. Deleting your account prevents you from giving Twitter any further value.
Once you have a personal policy of mistrusting Twitter under Musk, there is further concerns for privacy and misuse of personal data. Although other Twitter users don’t know my email address unless I post it, Twitter the company does. Twitter also knows my phone number. How is this data being monetized in the background? Given Musk’s new right-wing tendencies, how can I know that Twitter data is not being weaponized politically?
Once you have a service who has breached its trust with you as a user, your ability to control your own information is also subject to the same questions of trust. The best way to regain control, in this case, would be to delete your account, not simply abandon it or keep it active “in case things get better”.
Why should you delete your Twitter account, and also encourage others to do so?
Imagine a busy Twitter feed. You probably had one of your own.
Think about how the posts in that feed influence you. There are posts that are news. Posts that are someone’s “hot-take” on events. Posts that are funny. These, together, do make a difference.
Now, imagine that weaponized politics enters the room. Trolls post funny-but-horrible memes. Some of these might find resonance with some percentage of typical Twitter users. In fact, this has already been happening for years at Twitter, but mitigated by the Trust and Safety and other moderation efforts, all of which have been disbanded now.
So, you have a population of users who are not as aware or active as you might be, being exposed to more of a radical right wing underbelly of content than they ever have before. This is very likely to have a caustic effect, at very least moving the Overton Window in a lot of people’s minds.
If you aren’t paying for the service, then you are the product.
Do we want our friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors to add value to this platform? Do we want right-wing propaganda to be fed unfiltered to those who we have to interact with on a daily basis?
The conclusion that I reached: I need to sound the alarm. People need to exit the platform en masse. Now.
It does not matter that Elon reinstated the journalists that he’d banned a day before.
It doesn’t even matter if Elon steps down as the head of Twitter.
Twitter is now an untrusted entity. Maybe I’ll return one day, but that day will only come after a long road of trust-building happens, which does not seem likely today.
Watching Twitter burn makes me think of Twitter’s role in the Arab spring. Of all the great things it used to be. Of the serendipities I’d encounter from people I’ve never met. It’s such a loss to me. Pardon the analogy, but it feels to me like watching the twin towers crumble before my eyes.
I’m out. Account deleted. I encourage everyone else to do the same.
“I’m staying as protest” : you are still adding value to Elon Musk’s Twitter.
“I’m just letting the account sit for now” : you are still adding value to Musk’s Twitter.
“I’ll join X other platform and cross-post” : you are still adding value to Musk’s Twitter.
