I wish I could quit Twitter once more

This may sounds a bit stupid (or rather very stupid), but I wish I could quit Twitter again.

Let me explain.

In April 2022, more or less the day Twitter’s board approved Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company, I deleted my account. As I said in my post, I didn’t delete my then-almost-14-years-old account just because of Musk. His promised arrival at the company was the trigger I was waiting for. I needed a push, an excuse to click on the red button, and Musk gave it to me.

You see, I was growing more and more tired of the pressure of tweeting something, the need to always catch up with the latest tweets while this very blog was begging for my attention and time. I felt the social network of Twitter, its social graph, was broken. In more than a decade of tweets, replies, retweets, jokes, rants, comments, I barely gained any significant following, and not only I felt I was wasting my precious time, but it truly felt somehow useless. I may have more interactions with readers of my blog during a year than I’ve had with my Twitter followers for ten.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved using Twitter. I’ve made great “Twitter friends”, discovered fantastic links and websites, read funny jokes, followed live events unfold, etc.¹ Most of the people I follow today via newsletters and RSS feeds were discovered and/or “met” on Twitter. To me, Twitter was the essence of the web, its nervous system, and the main reason that I ended up working in content marketing, social media, and communications. But that’s a story for another day.

I still miss the micro-blog format of Twitter. Now, when I see something interesting but not worth writing a full blog post, I just keep it to myself, or maybe share it with a few friends via WhatsApp or iMessage. I know I could easily start something like that again on Mastodon for instance, but it would be going back to Twitter, without Twitter but with all the same issues: I don’t want to fall into the same pressure, disappointment, and lack-of-time again.²

I prefer my life without Twitter, no doubt about it. Most of the blog posts I’ve written since would have just been tweets instead if I still had my Twitter account, and I’m glad to express myself here, on my own website. And when I see the shit show that has become Twitter, I am not glad that I deleted my account: I am almost overjoyed that I did.

I’ve written about Elon Musk a few times, even compared him to a James Bond villain, which in hindsight is definitely Jonathan Price’s character in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). In all fairness, Twitter is not only bad because of him, but when I saw this headline on Mashable — Elon Musk ‘likes’ trending #BanTheADL posts as white supremacist ad runs on platform —  I wondered if “X” had hit a point of no return, especially because of him and his army of idiot fans. Matt Binder writes:

Musk himself soon began liking anti-ADL posts in support of the #BanTheADL hashtag, just hours after the ADL had said it had a fruitful discussion with representatives of his company. Musk specifically began liking content from Keith Woods, an anti-Semitic YouTuber with ties to white nationalist Richard Spencer. Woods was a speaker at the white supremacist American Renaissance Conference just last month.

After reading this, I checked the homepages of the main newspapers in the US and here in France, but this was — surprisingly — not considered first page news, at least not until he threatened to sue the association in question. The richest man in the world, with a huge political weight mostly granted by SpaceX, Starlink, and now Twitter, encourages and even promotes such behaviours — illegal in many places, regardless of what he thinks “free speech” means — and this is judged to be not worth covering by the mainstream media. I was a bit surprised to not see the word “dangerous” next to his name everywhere, and I’ve seen other public figures and politicians get far more critical coverage for way less than that.

Elad Nehorai posted on Threads:

It might just be me, but I am kind of shocked that there was just a mainstream neo-Nazi movement that was the top trending discussion on Twitter, promoted by the richest man in the world and the owner of the platform, and spread by the mainstream right…

And it isn’t one of the top news stories in America?

I couldn’t agree more, but not just in America, but in the whole world. Elon Musk doesn’t belong in the tech news section, like Trump used to belong to the Entertainment section of the Huffington Post before the US presidential election of 2016. He belongs in the International section, the homepage. His actions and his not-so-subtle little games of promoting a very specific, toxic ideology while pretending to be the good guy seriously worry me.

Last year, my reasons to quit Twitter may have looked a bit exaggerated: “Maybe you’re overreacting?” I told myself. Now the same reasons almost feel ridiculous considering what is happening today on the platform. I could tell myself I greatly anticipated all of it, but even in my worst predictions Twitter didn’t become this bad. It merely went bankrupt and disappeared, which let’s be honest would be a better outcome than the far-right unregulated and violent forum it is today.

Somehow I wish I could signal all of this by deleting my account, I sort of wish I had kept my account until deleting it had a stronger meaning, when this action had more weight. Although to be fair, there have been dozens of similar moments since he took over the platform, and I would probably have acted way sooner anyway. But these past couple of weeks feel different, as if the bar of what’s considered “normal” has been lowered drastically.

I am certainly giving too much credit to the act of deleting a Twitter account, especially one with a barely noticeable following like mine, and there are way, way better ways to signal the dangers of “X.” This is just a feeling I have, that I would like to once more give Musk the finger, and put it where it hurts him the most: the red “delete my account” button.