A few notes from my Twitter (X) breakup

And some broader social media takeaways

Last week I deleted my Twitter account. I hadn’t been on there for six months, and I’d decided an inactive account was probably worse than no account at all. But did I learn or gain anything from my decade on the platform? This is my attempt to figure it out.

I joined Twitter in 2012, and I built up to about 1250 followers, most of which came in the first year. I was on there primarily to keep up with the book industry and share my work, and I also enjoyed the insight into people’s lives. However, I often felt too rushed to join in properly, and it was never my forte to maintain a fast-paced written conversation with people I didn’t know well. I’d send out tweets, but then my inner overthinker (who’s called Hilda and can be a real bitch) would be shrieking aaaargh! at both the worry over what I said - Am I being too salesy? Do I sound silly? - and the time/energy it was taking to say it. Which is all pretty hilarious as the algorithm and my regular low engagement figures probably ensured I was tweeting at no one most of the time.

Twitter was also a time-suck: half an hour would go missing as soon as I clicked into the app. And yet, I persisted because there were some nuggets of gold, connections with people I really admire, and valuable industry insights. I’ve had some great moments with Twitter over the years. A chat with John Birmingham. A reply from Lisa Jewell. A follow from Bradley Trevor Grieve. These kinds of dopamine hits were enough to keep me scrolling. And I appreciated the real-time news information and updates too. Who wouldn’t want to watch the battle for US democracy on the Twitter feed of 6^th January 2021. Utterly terrifying, as I recall.

However, soon after Musk took charge, I decided to take a break. I was overwhelmed by the pace of it, concerned by Musk’s interventions, and finding less and less of value. Did I miss it? Not really. I pretty much forgot about it. But last week I ventured onto Twitter after six months of absence, curious to see if I could revive my interest in the platform, or whether I should make the final break and delete my account. Once logged in, I found that many friends and people I admire were still actively tweeting all the good things. There was the inevitable pile-on. (This time Anne Lamott had said something possibly ungracious about Taylor Swift, so people were busy taking her down.) And there was a whole lot of outrage: Gordon Brown and Gaza were the prevalent topics.

And then there were those tempting nuggets of gold. A quote from Maria Popova on love. Wow! A podcast with Marian Keyes and Tara Flynn. Excellent! But they would be my final discoveries as I hit the ‘Delete account’ button. For better or worse, I knew I didn’t belong there any more.

Why did it take me so long to figure this out? Well, because I’m still harnessing my relationship with social media. I was out of school by the time the internet’s powers were fully unleashed, and I was never taught how to quantify and control information in online spaces. Now, each day, we are all invited into Aladdin’s cave, with inexhaustible gold before us - knowledge, relationships, more products than we ever knew we wanted. When we connect to social media we are all Neos settling into our chairs, off to the Matrix. We are GOING IN. And we cannot control what we’ll find: we can only react to it – again and again and again. We’ll meet the outraged, depressed, pleading, anxious, dying – as well as the joyful, reassuring, calming, determined, inspiring, apparently winning at life (that’s a whole other post). But we are always only one click away from ALL THE THINGS at every moment of the day. As mere mortals, how can we be anything but constantly dazzled and utterly beguiled?

However, since our time and energy is finite, we must learn to select a few nuggets of gold, and discard the rest of the treasure. We must become experts in this decision-making, and trust that others are doing the same in a collective effort to build our worldwide online ecosystem into a valuable rather than degraded place to visit. And we must do all this knowing there are those who very much enjoy setting fire to things, just because they can; who delight in sitting back and watching lives and ideas burn.

Trying to master our position on this is incredibly disorientating. Here’s a recent quote from user Sam Missingham that came up on an Insta in-app promo for Threads, one of the new Twitter alternatives (which I haven’t joined so far):

Watching people slowly realise that threads also has bigots, racists, TERFs and p0rn bots etc is a trip. Did they really think they were all going to stay on Twitter?

I migrated to Substack because it felt fresh, but lately there’s been an outcry about some Substacks that promote hate speech (although the Substack honchos have noted the outrage and are making changes). It’s a reminder that, wherever we gravitate to online, the internet will continue to be ALL THE THINGS. Figuring out how to handle that, and developing ways of curating information and switching off despite the FOMO, will ensure that we take good care of ourselves, rather than living in service to an algorithm designed to keep us hooked and plugged in.

And what about the angry mob baying for their blood sacrifice? We can’t spend our lives appeasing them, fighting them, or avoiding the inevitable gaslighting. Instead, we can only do our own empirical research, and fervently champion those who inspire us with their kindness, talent and insight. And we need to be kind to ourselves too. This 24/7 challenge has only emerged in my lifetime, and now it must be tackled daily by every one of us with access to the internet, including (gulp) our kids. So if we’re having conversations around these topics, but don’t have all the answers, I think we’re probably doing all right.