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Quit Twitter?
It’s been a Fire Swamp, and it’ll get worse. Here’s where you can go.
Some people don’t have social media. They’ve read Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2019) or Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2020), or they have certain life experiences that make it plainly inadvisable for them to use social media, or they sense its potential dis-utility for them and thus they do not want it anyway.
But others have stuck around. Here, I’m thinking specifically of Twitter. Depending on who you are and how you use Twitter, your mileage varies widely. Many people experience Twitter as a kind of Fire Swamp. They’ve liked the adventure…or they’ve seen it as a necessary evil (e.g., they are authors, artists, organizers, business owners, or they otherwise need to speak to the Twitter audience for their jobs)…or they’ve hoped it’d get better…or they’ve believed it’d get worse, but they’ve been waiting for their entire friend-group or influence-sphere to decide it’s collectively time to leave.
Trump Is Coming Back
Trump was banned from Twitter a couple years ago, two days after the attack on the U.S. Capitol for which he has still not repented. But unless he goes to jail, which would be a long way off considering he hasn’t even been indicted yet, he can’t be kept off Twitter forever.
On April 4, Musk agreed to buy Twitter, but then he got cold feet, and the deal didn’t go through until October 27. He immediately fired the chief executives, and he’s said he wants to bring back Trump.
Musk, for his part, has wasted no time ratcheting up disinformation adjacent to political violence. The day after he acquired Twitter, there was an attempted assassination of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, to which Musk reacted by posting a obviously false conspiracy theory about her husband that he found on a right-wing disinfo site.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s head of Safety and Integrity admitted that, in the 48 hours since Musk acquired Twitter, the platform was deluged with racial slurs. That is how certain accounts were “celebrating” the incoming Twitter boss they know is sympathetic to their racist, violent speech.
