I opened Twitter to look at the tweet storm by Donald Trump concerning the four Congresswomen (all people of color) who were in a spat with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump’s insulting, bigoted tweets are disturbing, to put it mildly. And I also found that some of the tweets by some of the four targets, and their staff, of Trumps bigotry were also disturbing. I started to scroll through the Twitter feed, and my disgust continued to grow. Yes, Twitter has some value, but it has become mostly partisan bickering, political rants, hateful comments, and lots and lots of advertisements. I realized that I was truly wasting my time scrolling through mostly bile, while being the target of data harvesting by which the online tech companies advance surveillance capitalism. I don’t really get anything from Twitter, and I doubt that many other people do, either.
I follow a few journalists on Twitter, but I can more easily go to the online publications of their employers to read their work. Other than a handful of exceptions, Twitter is just a huge echo chamber.
I also object to the fact that Twitter makes an exception for certain people who consistently violate their rules, like Donald Trump (@realdonaldtrump). Trump consistently violates the Twitter Rules for abuse and hateful conduct, as well as threatening violence (see Rules excerpts at the end of this post). Trump uses Twitter to vent his bile almost daily, and his victims then reply, and it is game on. What’s the point? For Trump, the point is that he has trained the media and the online public to focus on his outrageous tweets instead of all the dire things he is doing to our country.
I was an early joiner of Facebook; I left it a couple of years ago out of disgust with the company and it’s executives. I have never been on Instagram, a variation of Facebook. I joined Twitter, but never truly understood it’s purpose or value (with a few exceptions). In my humble opinion, the highly touted “social media” have become very unsocial media. As of this moment I have 71 followers on Twitter. I started this blog that you are reading in 2004, have published 485 posts, written 45 unpublished drafts, it has 14 followers, and has had just under 24,000 “hits.” So yes, I am less than a blip in the online world. I continue to write and post on the blog because I like to write, and it is a good place to put these writings where I can easily find them.
And so I will terminate my Twitter account, and by so doing, I will be totally disconnected from the world of unsocial media. I will continue to post here, and if you choose to visit this site, maybe you will enjoy something once in a while. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.
Goodbye Twitter.
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Excerpts from Twitter Rules
We have one set of rules for the hundreds of millions of people who use Twitter and the hundreds of millions of Tweets sent every day.
Abuse
You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone or encourage others to do so. We consider abusive behavior as an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.
Hateful conduct
You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.
We are committed to combating abuse motivated by hatred, prejudice or intolerance, particularly abuse that seeks to silence the voices of those who have been historically marginalized. For this reason, we prohibit behavior that targets individuals with abuse based on protected category.
Inciting fear about a protected category
We prohibit targeting individuals with content intended to incite fear or spread fearful stereotypes about a protected category, including asserting that members of a protected category are more likely to take part in dangerous or illegal activities, e.g., “all [religious group] are terrorists”.
Abuse
You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone or encourage others to do so. We consider abusive behavior as an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.
Hateful conduct
You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.
We are committed to combating abuse motivated by hatred, prejudice or intolerance, particularly abuse that seeks to silence the voices of those who have been historically marginalized. For this reason, we prohibit behavior that targets individuals with abuse based on protected category.
Inciting fear about a protected category
We prohibit targeting individuals with content intended to incite fear or spread fearful stereotypes about a protected category, including asserting that members of a protected category are more likely to take part in dangerous or illegal activities, e.g., “all [religious group] are terrorists”.
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