Stop Twitter, I want to get off Twitter

(Photo by Akshar Dave 🪁 on Unsplash)

I have been tweeting for a long time, and it has been a place to vent, a place to find news and to share stories.

Most importantly, it's been a place to procrastinate. That might seem a weird thing to say, but when I'm bored, I check Twitter, and very often, I'll find some nugget of brilliance.

A video of Ricky Ponting dismissing Michael Vaughan in the 2005 Ashes, an explanation of the revolution happening in the strictly-Orthodox world, or my personal favourite of late, a thread of Liz Truss looking like various brands of toilet bleach.

Truly it is a goldmine.

The majority of the time, I've enjoyed it.

It is a place where my two staples in life, cricket and news, come together.

This came to a head last year with Azeem Rafiq's racism whistleblowing, and the subsequent story about him having shared antisemitic comments on social media.

It would be fair to say my worlds collided, and I was near-perfectly placed to write about it - and tweet about it - to my mixture of cricketing and Jewish followers.

But in the last few months I've come to the conclusion that Twitter isn't fun anymore.

It's taking its toll on me.

I feel bad when I'm on it.

I feel bad when I log off it.

I am stressed and anxious about things I've tweeted, or things I might have

shared in the past but forgotten about, and which might one day come and bite me in the backside.

And I'm concerned that I'm wasting my time, too.

I could be doing so much more with my life, other than sitting on Twitter.

So I'm going to try and stop.

But like with so many addictions, it's hard to realise it is an addiction.

The number of times I have told myself, "it's part of your job, it's fine", or "England are 198/8, just have a quick look at what CrivViz is saying", at 2.37am when I strangely can't sleep, because I keep checking my phone.

The bad is starting to outweigh the good.

Aside from the fact I think I might be addicted, it's becoming a poisonous place to exist for numerous reasons.

First and foremost, it's near impossible to discern fact from fiction, and as a journalist, that worries me.

Everyone can tweet what they want, and the only way of ensuring facts rise to the top, is by challenging so called 'fake news'.

This is exhausting, and I don't know if I have the energy to do this. I also don't know everything, so sometimes I see things, and I have no idea if it's true or not.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing quite like watching a breaking news story ripple through Twitter.

But so often, it is effectively a rumour-mill, driven by the uncomfortable truth - that your tweets do better if someone with a large following retweets them.

I might have a scoop. I might have the greatest story in the world. But if nobody sees my story, but someone DOES see another person's rip off - who happens to have 100,000 followers, I may as well be shouting into a desert.

What if something is false, but it's such clickbait, or so salacious, that someone with a large following retweets it and gives it a huge injection of publicity?

That entrenches that falsehood as a rumour with some kind of weight.

Ask yourself, what is the chance that all those people who saw that falsehood from someone with a large following, would see a correction?

I'm not aware of any studies that have been done on the impact of 'fake news', or the extent to which wrong stories can be corrected. But I'd be surprised if it's easy to rectify.

I read the other day that more than half of Republicans believe Donald Trump's falsehood, that the US election was stolen.

He was removed from Twitter over incitement relating to the Capitol Riot, where his consistently inflammatory and false tweeting accelerated the agitation of those who marched on Washington, and importantly, convinced them their cause was just. After all, the President was telling them it.

News that 59 percent of Republicans would start using Trump's own social media platform since he was kicked off Twitter, is a case-in-point, that the answer to falsehoods being shared on Twitter is not deleting that person's account, because it becomes like whack-a-mole.

Whether Trump, or disgraced rapper Wiley, or Katie Hopkins, or Alison Chabloz; when hatred, racism, incitement to violence is shared on Twitter, it needs to be followed up, with.. laws.

They need to be arrested if they're suspected of having committed a crime.

And Twitter has no mechanism in place for ensuring that illegal activity through its platform, is sent to relevant authorities.

There needs to be a Twitter police.

A prime example of this is, Wiley. He used Twitter, then Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to share antisemitic screeds, but he could not be prosecuted last year, because he sent the Tweets when he was abroad, and there was an issue with jurisdiction.

This is despite the fact, that Twitter has no jurisdiction. If you're anywhere in the world you can log in and tweet, and nobody knows where you're tweeting from - and if you choose nobody knows who you are even.

That is a problem.

Giving abusive or extreme individuals the opportunity to be abusive, and get away with it, needs addressing, in the same way allowing journalists to share un-evidenced stories or using their large platform to reinforce falsehoods to a wide audience, needs addressing.

One only has to look at Maajid Nawaz being allowed to remain on Twitter - unchallenged - despite actively discouraging Covid vaccinations - as a prime example of the platform simply not doing enough to take responsibility for those who use it.

Now, I don't want censorship. I don't want people's accounts to require a name. Even I used to have pseudonym when I was younger, and without that I wouldn't be where I am today, because it allowed me to make mistakes without people knowing who I was. The problem is not anonymity. It's accountability. Accounts can be anonymous on the outside, but there simply has to be some kind of link to their 'real life', when launching their profile, at least in the UK. (I know that this is a problem in authoritarian countries, where journalists are dependant, in some cases, on operating without the government knowing, or they could be locked up.)

Twitter has shown it has scant regard for tackling personal attacks, racism [in my experience antisemitism], misogyny and other forms of abuse.

I'm sick of waking up to direct message requests with images of Adolf Hitler. And that happens a lot.

I'm sick of being targeted by pile-on trolls, usually from the far-right, but also from the far-left in recent years.

I'm sick of reading anti-vaccination lies shared freely.

I'm sick of farmed trolls targeting journalists, with accounts regenerating, and there being no mechanism to remove the people who are behind them.

And lastly, I am sick of receiving emails from Twitter telling me accounts that have sent me Hitler images, antisemitic abuse, personal abuse or engaged in 'trolling', are not breaking the rules.

Recently I did a number of threads. One about the Harry Potter saga involving Emma Watson, and another about Jon Stewart and his comments about Goblins.

I had an exchange with someone who follows me, and one reply was screenshotted and shared widely on far-left social media, as some kind of evidence that antisemitism is only antisemitism when I say so. [Obviously that isn't true.]

I made the point, rather badly, that someone's motivation, beliefs, ideology was in my view quite relevant in determining whether comments or actions are antisemitic.

I deleted this thread, because I myself became unsure of what I thought on the issue - and I was beginning to get quite a lot of backlash from people replying and quote-tweeting.

And the lesson of this saga, is to never search your own name.

After I deleted it, I was quite shocked at the way in which this exchange, and the poll, had been plucked out of the conversation and presented as 'my view' on antisemitism, or worse, a representative view of an entire group of people.

It was utilised mainly by far-left activists, who dug up old tweets from years ago and presented them alongside this recent tweet, to make it out as if I'm directly contradicting myself.

It would be fair to say my mute and block buttons took a pounding in recent days.

Having your tweets screenshotted and widely shared, and used against you, isn't nice. It creates quite a lot of personal anxiety, and honestly, I am worried I am have done this to other people in the past. I'm sure I've sent lots of tweets I regret, but have forgotten.

While, I don't care what these individuals think, I do care what it might make other people think. I care that the hundreds of retweets for some of these posts will be seen by thousands of people, who will now think badly, potentially, of a wider group of people.

That being said, I am also sick and tired of having to constantly explain myself and clarify my views to perfect [and often anonymous] strangers, over the internet.

The result of all of this, is I have spent the last few days deleting old tweets.

What I feel, seeing a fraction of the 91,000 tweets I've sent, is that it's all rather tedious.

It's not enjoyable, it's stressful.

Most of the tweets I've sent are trivial and amount to very little, and I need an indefinite break.

Not only do I need a break until Twitter changes for the better, but

perhaps, me too.

Find me on Facebook instead.