I wasn't ever particularly fond of Twitter as a medium. It was always too shallow, too reactive, too fragmenting of mind and focus. I mean, "microblogging?" It was always going to be the sort of thing that rewarded the hot-take, the provocation, the knee-jerk reaction. Whenever I'd spend any significant time with it, I'd feel...dumber. Angrier. More trivial.
There were ways around that, though. Tweetdeck worked nicely to focus in on the content that had value. Artists and musicians. Science feeds. Thoughtful, faithful voices and reliable commentators. Those feeds were delightful.
But now, that's a privilege I'd have to pay for, from a platform that's starting to do real damage. It's a seething hell-pit of lies and umbrage, and the monstrous falseness of bad-actors there is now nearly impossible to avoid. "Truth" is completely obscured, and where truth and falsehood are on a level, the pernicious and the absurd tear a soul apart.
Like, say, in the recent and lingering insanity around Hurricane Helene. When a platform is actively promoting accounts that spread lies, gossip, misinformation and conspiracy theories, and that promotion is sabotaging relief efforts? It's actively harmful. That was, for me, the threshold event, the line too far. I've got enough rightwingers in my feed that I saw the falseness being shared, saw the sudden centering of pure weather-control delusion.
I also don't appreciate being forced to follow Johnny Ketamine, having him arrive in my feed whether I wish to encounter him or not. It feels too much like I'm reading the Corporate Approved Newsthoughts, and is too reminiscent of something I read in Mussolini's autobiography. The key to fascist success, Benito argued, lay not simply in projecting force on the streets, as parades of flag bearing blackshirts performed their dominance display. It required having your own radio stations and newspapers, creating a media ecosystem that you controlled completely. Truth Social flailed around trying to become what X already is: an implement of social control right out of Fahrenheit 451.
X had become, preposterously, the "media of record," with "tweets" being taken as quasi-official public statements. If you're traditional media, and you want a controversial hot-take from some rando, it'll serve that up in a heartbeat. If you're an agitator or professional gadfly, you can burp out a hundred characters and stir an ephemeral controversy.
I didn't want to put in the time there, to constantly react and tend and feed the beast.
It's not necessary for my life. It's a crap medium for conversation and relationship building. It fragments our thinking and disrupts communities. It's a threat to the Republic, and a threat to the integrity of Christian faith.
So I'm done.
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