I joined Twitter in 2009, mainly to see what all the hype was about. I liked the vibe of the place, and the fact that I could use third-party apps to post things there was also a definite bonus. Not long after I started writing for The Unofficial Apple Weblog in mid-2009, Twitter became the main medium by which I interacted with readers. One of those readers lived in the same town in NZ that I did, and he liked my work enough that he offered me a real-life, real-world job. Every job that I’ve held since then has been built off the foundations of that first one.
It’s therefore not hyperbole to say that I got where I am today because of Twitter. Without it, I wouldn’t have had anything like the career I enjoyed between 2012 and 2023. Hell, I probably wouldn’t still be in New Zealand if it weren’t for the career opportunities that opened up for me because of just a single early 2012 tweet from my NZ-based follower, who put out a call for any writers interested in a position…
After TUAW got shut down in 2015, I slowly used Twitter less and less actively. I still doomscrolled through it every day, just a casual observer of how the world slowly went down the tubes over the next few years, watching with equal bits horror and curiosity. As the world became the equivalent of a gruesome car wreck that you didn’t want to see, but simply could not turn away from, so too did Twitter.
As Twitter increasingly became a weaponised platform, I became increasingly disinterested in engaging with it. I don’t watch Fox News for a very good reason, and by 2018 Twitter was starting to feel very much as though it had become the Fox News of social media. As far-right radicals (including the President of the United States) amped up their use of the platform to spread messages of hatred, division, and disinformation, I hoped — and so did a lot of other people — that the people running Twitter would finally step in with some much-needed moderation.
No such luck. Jack Dorsey, one of the guys who founded Twitter and who was still (kind of) running it, responded to calls for increased moderation with a bunch of tech-bro libertarianism and “both sides are equally bad” arguments. Whether he intended it or not, what I took away from his response to the influx of literal goddamned Nazis (LGNs) on Twitter was that, instead of wielding a banhammer like it was Mjolnir, Dorsey (and Twitter) were stroking their beards and furrowing their brows and saying, “Wait, wait: let’s hear them out.”
I knew then that it was time to jump off the burning oil rig. I could not in good conscience continue to support, with either my time or attention, a platform that allowed LGNs free rein to say whatever the hell they wanted, or to allow the unhinged President to use the same platform to spread malicious lies and disinformation like it was going out of style (Narrator: It was not going out of style).
I’d seen before what happens when a social media enclave is (mis)managed by a laissez-faire site owner who styles himself as a “free-speech absolutist” who expects the “marketplace of ideas” to condemn and ultimately negate any genuinely harmful or disgusting rhetoric. It’s the sociolinguistic equivalent of the right-wing mantra against the concept of economic regulation: “let the free market decide”. What happened in this earlier case — a web-based community of mostly like-minded people that pre-dated the very concept of social media itself — was that the trolls slowly and insidiously took the site over, drove out all the old regulars, and left the place a digital ghost town with nothing more than a single far-right nutjob shrieking conspiracy theories into otherwise empty online discussion boards.
In other words, the consequence of “free speech absolutism” on that website was — shockingly — that psychopaths with copious free time and zero social inhibitions or shame became the loudest voices in the room and drove everyone else away.
I could see the same thing happening to Twitter, so it was in the middle of either 2018 or 2019 — I can’t remember which, but long ago enough now that it doesn’t matter — that I deleted my account and bid Twitter a one-fingered adieu.
Finally, in January of 2021 Trump did something that not even the pseudo-libertarian tech bros running Twitter could forgive. Apparently, using the platform to incite an insurrection against the government was one step too far under Twitter’s terms of service. Or at least it used to be.
And now, as we’re all painfully aware, Elon Musk owns Twitter. And unlike the surface-level success he’s had at Tesla, or the admittedly impressive work that SpaceX and Starlink have done, Musk has done more harm to Twitter in less than a year than an army of dedicated far-right trolls could have done in five.
I got ample evidence of Twitter’s further descent into poo-flinging madness earlier today. I was directed via Daring Fireball to a Tweet thread about “social authoritarianism”. I’m not going to go too deeply into what I think about what the author of that thread had to say, other than that I disagree with his conclusions primarily because they smell an awful lot like the “free speech absolutism” peddled by Musk, Dorsey, and the unnamed lazy site owner of that unnamed website from the deep woods of my past. (One of the replies to this thread even bloviates about the “marketplace of ideas” concept, which… heh. Thanks for proving my point, “libertarian” dudebro.)
Nah, what really drove home to me how much of a complete cesspool Twitter has become was the “More tweets” thing below that thread, which was just wall-to-wall right-wing bullshit. Some negative meme about Greta Thunberg. Kevin McCarthy wailing about Trump’s (supposedly) impending arrest being a miscarriage of justice. At least four separate “this guy from the hood OWNS Fauci when he goes door-to-door peddling the jab” tweets. At least three openly anti-trans tweets.
If that’s what counts as a “marketplace of ideas”, I have a better idea: nope. Your marketplace sucks, and I’m taking my attention — the real currency of the vaunted “marketplace of ideas” — elsewhere.
“So much for the tolerant left!” Well, yeah. I’m intolerant of intolerance. That isn’t the “gotcha” moment that people on the far right think it is. And as for the libertarian dudebros who want to use the same “let the free market decide” argument as capitalist oligarchs, I wonder how long their insistence on free-speech absolutism would hold up if they, like me in early 2014, had to spend the worse part of a month dealing with an onslaught of harassers and trolls sicced on them by a prominent tech bro who didn’t like being publicly called out on his BS. How much value does your “marketplace of ideas” place on a dude who has nothing better to do for a full month than send an ongoing torrent of harassing tweets and emails, some of them threatening to end your career, others threatening to end your life? And this happened in 2014. I can only imagine how much worse it would be today.
Like so much of the pre-2016 world, I miss what Twitter used to be. I owe a lot of who I am today to the Twitter of those days. But that Twitter is long gone, and the twitching, shambling thing that bears its name today needs to be put out of our collective misery.