Time to join the Twitter quitters

It was fun at first. A novelty, being able to communicate with the world in 140-word soundbites, to share our passing, pithy, wannabe witty thoughts. It brought people together, was a good place to chat about football and music. It quickly became the quickest source of news and if you got your following strategy right, it took you straight to all the articles you wanted to read. It was occasionally tetchy, often funny. It was addictive too, and I soon found myself spending too much time on Twitter, too embroiled in silly arguments about everything from sport to politics.

Over the years, it changed. As more people came online, the old etiquettes started to fracture. As algorithms became increasingly sophisticated, people started to split into tribes. Debate became polarised; sharing opinions on some issues suddenly required unanimity on all. Cancel culture and doxxing made the discussions ever more toxic. Then Elon Musk arrived and started un-banning people who had spread hate and misinformation; the algorithms changed again until a large proportion of the content I saw seemed to fit one or both of those categories. Then a set of horrific child murders took place in Southport and Twitter was up front and centre in circulating lies about the suspect’s identity, leading directly to racist rioting on British streets.

If it wasn’t already all over, it is now.

I understand why people use X – the malevolent version of an already toxified site – and for the same reasons, I still will to a degree. It remains the quickest source of news and of reaching some of the content across multiple publications that I would like to read. It can be helpful professionally. But I can’t in all conscience continue to scream into that toxic void: I won’t be tweeting, retweeting or ‘liking’ anything on X. As of today, I’m a Twitter quitter.

Bully for me I know; it’s not like it will make an iota of difference whether or not Rory from the UK is providing his latest hot take or pointless anecdote. My hope is that if regulation cannot address the real and present danger that X and other social media provides, some of our leading institutions and celebrities will also soon walk away and start the endgame for the site. It’s surely only the absence of a viable alternative that has prevented that happening already. Advertisers are already withdrawing in their droves.

As some of my friends have pointed out, X and other social media are only part of the problem. A big one in the case of the UK riots – and a number of platforms have been able to unite sinister and malevolent forces that would otherwise have remained isolated. But social media has amplified a trend where politicians, journalists and others deliberately generate and give credence to blatant lies. Call it ‘fake news’ if you like, but Donald Trump and others have ushered in an era where your own ‘alternative facts’, if repeated often enough (and amplified via social media) can compete with and even replace the truth.

There is no question that social media has fuelled and enabled this trend, but it did not create it. An era in which everyone has their own truth is a frightening and dangerous one: liberty and democracy are under genuine threat if the word of demagogues and their mouthpieces become established fact in the eyes of millions. Witness the events of January 6 in the US or the last week in the UK: both propelled by deliberate and widely shared falsehoods.

But social media is the engine by which these untruths reach millions. The lack of responsibility taken by social media companies and their resistance to regulation has to be addressed urgently. The glee with which Elon Musk is cheering on the misinformers may be specific to X, but there are other platforms where there is little or no moderation and where lies, conspiracy theories and plots to commit violence and terrorism are easily shared and advanced. Social media has grown up as a free-for-all with no regulation: that can’t be allowed to continue. Even our biased press is subject to some rules and sanctions.

On the bright side, quitting Twitter has made me think more widely about the control my phone exerts over my life. I’ve today deleted both the X app and the Facebook app; I may access them when I need to but scrolling socials is no longer going to be my default response to a break in conversation or an idle moment on a journey. I’ve got out of the habit of reading books regularly – let me have your recommendations! -I don’t exercise enough. I probably don’t converse or socialise enough. All these things become more possible without endless doom scrolling.

So if I have one thing to thank the dreadful Elon for, it’s inspiring me to a digital detox that I hope will be life-changing. I’m afraid that I’ll probably still continue to blog occasionally – maybe I will even write more – but hopefully that’s a small price to pay.