R.I.P. Twitter

So, Elon Musk bought Twitter.

Here’s the thing. Twitter has always been a mix of great and terrible. The problem is that the great parts aren’t replicable in other forums. I can set up a Slack or a Discord to talk about Star Trek or The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City with my friends who I talk about those things with; but they’re private spaces. On the one hand, hooray! No harassment! On the other hand, cool strangers won’t stumble upon us to chime in by accident, and we’ll never stumble upon them. Because the thing that makes Twitter awful - our wholly unregulated, free, unmoderated access to each other - is also what made it special.

I’ve had Twitter since 2008, and I’ve been A Somebody on Twitter since about 2017, the first time I had a tweet go viral and I shifted from the realm of “a couple hundred friends who are all people I basically know” to the growth trajectory which led to the 46,000-ish followers I currently have. But the first time I realized how much I needed Twitter was in 2014, during the Ferguson protests. I was following protesters on the ground, photographers, activists, and then I was watching and reading the regular news, and it was absolutely mindblowing how different the narratives were. That’s when I realized that the great value of that unregulated, unmoderated, wide-open marketplace of ideas - when it’s at its best - is that I don’t always know what I don’t know. We get our news in silos now. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to go looking for that information. And yet I was wholly ill-informed without it. I wouldn’t have understood what was truly happening if I’d only been reading mainstream news sources, who were quoting press releases from police departments that totally contradicted something I had just watched on four different people’s iPhone videos posted to Twitter.

Over the years, I’ve been judicious about who I follow on Twitter - it’s less than 2,000 people - and intentional about making sure I’m hearing the voices that often go unheard. Am I following enough trans and nonbinary people, in order to have a fuller understanding of how a given event is both affecting them, and being received by their community? When I read about activism on behalf of people with autism, am I hearing about it only from parents of autistic children or am I also hearing the voices of adults with autism who are speaking for themselves? I realized during the worst days of Trump’s immigration policies that I didn’t have nearly enough Muslim women in my feed, and was really proactive in seeking out those voices so that I knew, when I quoted or retweeted things, that I was allying with what the community was asking for instead of accidentally repeating things that are harmful. Marginalized communities aren’t monoliths, which is why just having One Black Friend On Twitter is useless if you’re trying to learn; and that unrestricted access, the ease through which we could find each other and discover important new voices and perspectives to follow, isn’t something that can be replicated in a more private forum.

The downside, of course, is that when any stranger can find you, that means any stranger can find you.

I’ve been pretty lucky in my Twitter career. I’ve never had to report rape or death threats to law enforcement, for example; you’d be surprised at how many people I know have. I’ve never had a threat of online violence cross over into my real life, with the exception of right-wing trolls who will periodically find my book on Amazon and give it one star because they didn’t like something I tweeted. (The more egregious of these are fairly easy to spot and Amazon does let you report them for removal.) I’ve never had anyone post my personal information, or harass my family.

But I’ve spent dozens of hours in therapy sessions over the past years talking about Twitter. I’ve had days I couldn’t get out of bed because of Twitter. I’ve had real-life relationships affected, real-life moments where I couldn’t be present, because something horrible that had happened on Twitter was consuming me. People think of having a lot of followers on social media as aspirational. Maybe for some folks it is. On some sites, you can monetize that or use it to build a brand or a business.

On Twitter, what it gets you is visibility, and visibility makes you a target.

I have tried and failed in the past to take breaks from Twitter when things got very bad, but it was like an addiction. I would log out, I would delete the app, and still minutes later I would be right back there, scrolling through whatever was today’s avalanche of garbage because something I tweeted about politics, or misogyny, or a television show, or Catholicism, had been quote-tweeted into a hornet’s nest of trolls, and a pile-on was escalating. This year, I decided - both for book deadline reasons, and for mental health reasons - to give up Twitter for Lent, and for the first time in my whole life, I wasn’t even tempted to cheat. It was such an overwhelming relief not to be there. Yes, I missed my friends who I only see on Twitter, and yes, I did feel like I was substantially less-informed on global events than I was used to being, and those are both problems in need of real solutions; but it was also the longest stretch I’ve gone in at least six years without a man I’ve never met before saying “shut up, fat bitch” because he disagreed with my opinion. When I returned to Twitter after Easter, it took exactly one day for everything to go right back to as bad as it had ever been; when I tweeted that Monday expressing real concern - as a survivor of a recent bilateral pulmonary embolism, now an increasingly commonly-reported symptom of Long COVID - about the risks of flying to the UK to visit my girlfriend now that the mask mandates have been lifted, I had to block about fifty people in the span of 24 hours for saying things like “maybe you should worry less about my mask and more about your own comorbidities” or “if I was stuck on a plane next to you I’d cough right in your face lol”. After forty days and forty nights of peace and quiet on the internet, it was jarring to come back and realize how much better my mental health was when I wasn’t on Twitter.

At the same time, where do we go? What’s the replacement where we can still step outside our bubbles and silos to hear the voices we don’t yet know we need to be hearing, to meet the friends we haven’t made yet - without opening ourselves up to what is about to become a rapidly-worsening environment for right-wing harassment? The term “free speech” is a very specific code for a very specific person and all you need to know about what will happen next is that Elon Musk’s takeover is being received, in right-wing circles, as a new day dawning for their ability to attack and harass and troll with even greater impunity. The protections we had before were flimsy at best, like going to war with paper armor. Now we don’t even have that.

I’m torn about deactivating altogether or not. I’m proud of the things I’ve written and of what I made of the tiny corner of the internet that was mine. I’m proud of the voices I lifted up and the stories I told. I don’t know that I’m ready for all of that to go away. At the same time, the thought of a website like the one this new iteration of Twitter is about to become, benefiting and profiting from that content doesn’t feel good either. And I don’t want to leave overnight without any plan in place for how to remain in contact with the people I don’t want to lose. So either way, it will be a slow easing out, as we all figure out what to do and where to do in a space we’ve just been told is about to become exponentially less safe for us.

So I’m trying this.

I have this website, which I rarely used and which until yesterday I don’t think I’d updated in years (I delinked the “press” page because it stopped in 2014, before my book or my biggest play came out, to give you an example), and I want to see what I can do with the tools I’ve already got, like a newsletter and this blog, to try and create another little corner of the internet where we can talk and learn and share and make dumb jokes, but with a degree of safety that we couldn’t have before. I don’t know if it will work, and I know it can’t replace what Twitter - at its best - had the capacity to be, if only the safety of its users had mattered as much as profits; but it’s where I’m going to start.

So! The comments are open! How are you feeling about Twitter? Are you staying? Are you leaving? What will you miss? Where are you headed next? What are you afraid of? What are the gifts it has given you?