Approximately six months ago, I was at a crossroad with Twitter. Unfiltered, it has become too toxic and negative to continue to allow into my life. My dilemma is that, after 11 years on the platform, there are a host of people I’ve never met “IRL” whom I consider friends or with whom I want to maintain a connection. Twitter has always been that connection.
What originally drew me to Twitter was an ease of interacting with a community of technologists and geographers, who shared tools, techniques, and knowledge. Over the years, as Twitter has “grown up” and captured the wider public imagination, in addition to changes in the behavior of the platform itself, the content of my feed has skewed more to the political and the negative – especially after the 2016 election.
This trend seems to apply regardless of ideology. People with opinions that span the political spectrum seem to take to Twitter to leave bite-sized and brash statements that bolster whatever position or candidate they support. In some ways, the structure of Twitter encourages this, even with the advent of longer tweets and threads as first-class citizens.
In the three years since the last election, I’ve become incredibly familiar (more than I ever wanted to be) with the political and social positions of a lot of people I follow, and not a single position has changed or evolved in that time. It has become a digital Forum Romanum, with countless self-styled tribunes shouting speeches into the passing crowd.
I didn’t need to continue to allow this in my life.