The final push I needed to leave Twitter for good

Everything I have ever learnt about Elon Musk, I have learnt against my will. With his recent acquisition of Twitter – purchased on a whim, the same way you and I might consider trying out a fringe or straight-leg jeans after skinnies – my knowledge base has, sadly, only increased.

Despite his maverick image, Musk seems to be following a classic rich-person template: buy a company, fire most of its workforce, offer consumers less for more. Rinse and repeat, often from a yacht.

But the concept of charging for their Twitter use just didn’t hit right with a lot of people, including me. Paying $US8 a month to the world’s richest man to feel terrible about everything was the push I needed to finally leave the platform for good.

Over the past four or five uniquely deranged years in American public life, Twitter has come to inhabit an outsized role in shaping public debate. It used to be a place where weirdos and journos – a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap – tried out bad jokes and sometimes even made friends. A dive bar without the mysteriously sticky floor.

Lately, Twitter has been the ultimate forest where you can’t see the trees.

But lately, Twitter has been the ultimate forest where you can’t see the trees. Silly arguments have consumed even the sanest people on it, like the time the hive mind deemed home-cooking “classist”, only for the consensus to flip the next day to frame restaurant diners as the real villains.

Meanwhile, as regular Twitter users bickered over the capitalist evils of shop-bought versus home-cooked meals, fringe Twitter – QAnon acolytes, election deniers, conspiracy theorists who failed high school biology but know a lot about vaccines – took over the site.

They were amplified by outlets like Fox News and, shortly afterwards, found themselves swimming in the mucky mainstream of American politics. That’s why we’re in this odd situation where multiple members of the US Congress have been elected on a platform of denying its legitimacy.

I can’t fix democracy, but I can start flossing. Another way to tend to my own garden? Quitting Twitter. I thought it would be hard, but it was easy, just like when I quit another nefarious social-media platform 10 years ago: Facebook. (Mark Zuckerberg really wants us to call it Meta, but he needs to learn a lesson from the Bureau of Meteorology’s attempted rebrand in Australia.)

Like Twitter, Facebook wanted to sell us something none of us needs, and which we feel worse for owning: a social-media presence. I feared leaving Facebook would render me hopelessly isolated from all my friends, but instead it forced me to communicate with them directly.

I’m hopeful leaving Twitter will have the same effect. For my news consumption, I check the websites of legitimate sources – like this one – instead of mindlessly refreshing an arbitrary feed as if I’m playing the pokies.

Maybe quitting was easy because ageing means you no longer care that much about what everyone else is doing. In line for a coffee the other day, I saw the Zoomers in front of me gathered around a phone looking at BeReal, which I’m told is the new social media tool of choice. A younger me would have downloaded it and found it utterly confounding, as happened with Snapchat a few years ago. Now I can save myself the energy. I wouldn’t understand it – and that’s okay. Let’s hope Elon doesn’t, either.

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