All Twittered Out

Today is my last day on Twitter. 

I joined the platform in December 2008 - or nearly 180,000 tweets ago - and I've met a host of wonderful people on there, some of which I now count among my best friends. 

But, in the past 14 years, Twitter has become a very different beast to what it was in the beginning and I've now reached a point where the pros of being a Tweeter no longer outweigh the cons. It's been a decision I've wrangled with for a while but the time to leave has now come. 

It was all so very innocent in the early days. Who remembers when the biggest story on Twitter was Stephen Fry getting stuck in a lift? It even made the newspapers.

Even so, I took some persuading to join. 

I'd always been dubious about the value of social media. I couldn't see the point of it. I had a wide circle of friends already. And I completely agreed with what Tom Hodgkinson wrote in his cautionary 2008 booklet, We Want Everyone: Facebook and the New American Right: 

'This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you." But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect to the people around me? Why should my human relationships be mediated through the banal language and feeble imaginations of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub? Why do we need an alternative to real life? And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable like talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk.’ 

So I resisted Twitter for a year or so (and I didn't join Facebook or Instagram until 2012). I was eventually persuaded to sign up by my publisher, Pan Macmillan. My first book was due out and Twitter, I was reliably informed, was an ideal way to promote it. 

Maybe it was in the early days. But does it work for people like me in 2022? Twitter works brilliantly if  you're a celeb with an established fan base that hangs on your every word. But it's a rather different experience for the non-famous writer. As novelist Chuck Wendig puts it: 

'You’re in a plane. You have thousands of your books in boxes. Below you, on the ground, are your readers. Somewhere. They’re down there. You want to tell them about your book so, to do so, you throw thousands of copies of your book out of the plane in the hopes that they get copies. They will not. The books will fall into lakes and rivers, they will smash car windows and be lost. Even if you tell your potential readers, “Hey, look for my plane, wait for my book drop”, it won’t matter very much. You might slightly increase the number of people who find the books. But that’s it (Note: please do not do any of this, it’s a metaphor).’  

However, I took my publisher's advice and I signed up. And, to begin with, things were fine. Twitter didn't ask for much personal information, which suited me. There were few adverts (and none at all once I was awarded a blue tick). And with short sharp 'tweets' being exchanged between individuals it appeared to be little more than a harmless real-time global conversation engine. I quite liked that and I used it to do fun things. 

I got together a group of like-minded Tweeters and musicians and we co-wrote a silly comic 'Shoperetta' based in a supermarket.  

'Weigh out the cheese, slice up the bacon 

Tidy the aisles and shelves ready to take ‘em 

Let the tills ring with the money we've taken. 

Our store is now open for you! 

Fill up your carts, let the spending go on 

'cos shopping's like life - when it's gone it's gone!

Put the scallops on ice, set your price guns on stun

Our store is now open for you. 

Welcome my friends, let the buying begin! 

Please swipe your card with the stripe facing in. 

We’re open ‘til Midnight so spend like a King 

Our store is now open for you!'

I got people involved in crowd-sourcing interesting ideas for QI (I was an 'elf' back then - one of the TV show's researchers and writers). 

I organised some charity fund-raising stunts and art challenges online. 

And then I was invited by Brave Soldier Films to take part in a documentary about the future of social media. You can watch the short piece I was in by clicking here.

Twitstunt saw me meeting up with five strangers in a bar where we were given a curious task - to have a drink together but only engage with each other via Twitter. In 2008 it was very odd to see a group of people sitting together in a social context while focused on their phones instead of each other. 

How times have changed. 

As we commented at the time, it felt really strange - even uncomfortable. We were all constantly looking up from our screens to read each other's body language in order to add much-needed meaning and nuance to the conversation - after all, 70-80% of all face-to-face communication is non-verbal and, when all you have is the written word, you miss so much. And then, occasionally, someone would laugh or snigger and we'd all desperately try to find out why and feel frustrated and excluded if we couldn't. 

We were asked: 'Were the words on the screen enough to have a meaningful chat?' 

You won't be surprised to hear that they weren't. 

Like Tom Hodgkinson, I had already started to suspect that social media had the potential to disengage and isolate rather than bring people together in any kind of meaningful way. And taking part in Twitstunt reminded me just how important personal contact is for us humans. So I organised what I called a Twissup - a meeting where people who only knew each other from Twitter could meet in the flesh. We met in a pub in central London and many new friendships were made that day - some of which are still as strong as ever. 

It went so well that the Twissups became regular events. We arranged Karaoke nights and we went bowling. We visited a range of restaurants and sampled different cuisines. And, for me, Twitter took on the same kind of role as the telephone. It was a way to keep in touch with friends between physical meetings. It was never a replacement for live interaction. It's notable that I am considerably closer to those people than I am to the vast majority of people on social media that I have never met in real life. 

Meanwhile, Twitter was growing at a startling rate. When I joined in 2008 Twitter had six million users. Today it has 396.5 million users. That's small-fry compared to some other platforms - Facebook currently has just under three billion active users or roughly 37% of all the human beings on the planet - but 396.5 million is still six times the population of the UK. And, as user numbers swelled, so did the number of incidents of bullying. And a number of high profile incidents had started to set my alarm bells ringing.

One of the most publicised was the case of Justine Sacco. In December 2013 she took a plane from New York to Cape Town with a stop-over at London Heathrow. Always one for a spiked or satirical comment, she sent out several tweets to her modest 170 followers about her travels. They included one that said: 

She pressed ‘send’ and got on her plane, little expecting that her acerbic comment about white privilege and the fact that black people didn’t get the same level of protection, treatment and support would cause any offence. 

But, as she landed in Africa and switched on her phone, she discovered that all hell had broken loose in her absence. There were over 100,000 comments on Twitter naming and shaming her as a racist. Her name had appeared in over a million Google searches. She was the Number-One worldwide trending topic on Twitter. And she had lost her job as a PR manager. The fact that all of this happened while she was incommunicado added piquancy to the situation. For the trolls it became a challenge to think up the most suitably caustic comment for Sacco to read once she’d landed. 

‘All I want for Christmas is to see Justine Sacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail,’ commented one Tweeter. 

Another wrote, ‘We are about to watch this Justine Sacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired!’ 

#HasJustineLandedYet became one the most used hashtags for that year. 

As she told journalist Jon Ronson in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, that one tweet - intended for her 170 friends who all knew her and understood her sense of humour - completely destroyed her life. ‘It was a joke about a dire situation in post-apartheid South Africa that we don’t pay attention to,' she explained. 'It was completely outrageous commentary on the disproportionate AIDS statistics. To me it was so insane a comment to make I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was a literal statement.’ 

But she was wrong. And apologising did no good because people didn’t want an apology. They wanted blood. And that meant keeping their outrage going. Some people even manufactured lies about her to stoke the flames of righteous anger. Word spread around the Internet that she was heiress to a $4.8 billion fortune, being the daughter of a South African mining tycoon. She wasn’t. She was brought up on Long Island by a single mother who worked as a flight attendant. Her estranged father sold carpets. But the appearance of privilege gave people permission to punch upwards. And Twitter provided them with a public forum in which to display their own ‘holier-than-thou’ lack of prejudice. 

Sacco’s life was devastated by people who will never meet her and who may now have actually forgotten all about her and gone back to their otherwise normal and decent lives - just like the pitchfork-wielding villagers in the Frankenstein story. Or the people who once screamed for women accused of witchcraft to be hanged or burned alive. There is madness in mobs. 

It's all too easy to lack empathy when you never get to look into the eyes of your victim. Twitter allowed just that. It empowered the mobs and the platform was fast becoming the modern online equivalent of the stocks or the pillory where faceless trolls hiding behind anonymous avatars could spit their vitriol, seemingly without any repercussions. 

Meanwhile, in another well-publicised case just last year, Twitter refused to take down widely-shared pornographic images and videos of a teenage sex-trafficking victim despite numerous requests because it 'didn't find a violation' of their policies. The child involved in the material was 13 years old. It took the involvement of Federal Officers to finally get the material removed. Meanwhile it had caused a great deal of anguish and stress to the victim and their family.  

And those are just two cases among thousands.

Some have ended in suicide.

It soon became impossible to express an opinion without a pile-on. Reasoned discussion and conversation was disappearing. Angry rhetoric was destroying sensible debate. Death and rape threats were issued to people who dared express unpopular opinions. Misinformation and disinformation muddied the truth about everything from vaccines to Brexit to trans rights and immigration. Urban myth and conspiracy theories abounded. And then it became the politicians' platform of choice - particularly those on the far right or far left.  Division lines were drawn and society began to fracture. Things finally came to a head when Twitter was forced to remove a US President from the platform.

The bosses of Twitter pointed out, of course, that they were blameless - they supported the right to free speech and it was the users making these comments and threats, not them. But that's the same argument as 'guns don't kill people, people kill people'. It's a nonsense defence because people in positions of responsibility can control access to guns or ban them altogether. By not controlling the environment Twitter was wholly complicit in allowing hatred and bigotry a global voice. 

I tried to make Twitter work. I used various apps and filters to cut through the noise. I blocked the haters and trolls. But it did no good. I still got to see most of the nasty stuff, often because Twitter friends would retweet it while commenting how awful it was. And I was no longer confident about what I could safely tweet. Justine Sacco typed one ill-considered tweet and her life was ruined. What if I did the same? On one occasion I made a slightly arched comment about Trump's failure to criticise the storming of the Capitol Building in January 2021 and a large number of MAGA supporters laid into me and some even retweeted my comment to the CIA. Really?

Then, the final straw came when Elon Musk bought the platform for $44 billion dollars and immediately started talking about monetising it. 

There is so much good that he, and other uber-rich billionaires, could be doing to alleviate human suffering and to make the world a better place. Just think what $44 billion could achieve ... and yet Musk chose to buy Twitter in order to make more money. 

Twitter could be a wonderful thing. With very little work it could be turned into a free, life-enhancing force for good. It could have been to conversation and idea sharing what Wikipedia is to knowledge. But no, it's become all about people paying $8 a month to have a blue tick, suspending the accounts of people who criticise or take the mickey out of the platform's new owner, and - as Musk himself tweeted - a platform for delivering more advertising.

So, I'm leaving Twitter tomorrow. 

I'm parting with some small sorrow but life existed before Twitter and it will carry on after Twitter.

I already feel as if a weight is being lifted off my shoulders. We are constantly bombarded with negativity these days. I gave up reading newspapers and watching TV news a few years ago and felt immediately better as the result. I still know what's going on in the world - unless you're a hermit you can't avoid it - but I've turned down the volume. By leaving Twitter I'm turning it down even more. I'm taking another positive step towards a happier life and better mental health.

And now I'm off down the pub to drink and chat and laugh and to do what humans are meant to do - connect with each other in the real world.