Leaving twitter

Nothing I have to say is important enough to fund hatred.

I used to love micro-blogging via twitter. I enjoyed sharing in the mix of humanity’s meaningless and meaning-filled reflections in a socially connected world. My preference was to weave together being a priestly presence and the hobby of long distance cycling: creating a niche of posts hashed as #ClergyWhoCycle and #PrayerInPublicSpaces . I was aware of social media bubbles and echo chambers, and didn’t really worry about it: it was only harmless micro-blogging after all.

Twitter always contained people who would take advantage of anonymity to make hate filled comments, but there were also wonderful people shining in the middle of this darkness: sharing love, peace and joy with their connections. I felt part of that.

In 2022, the new owner of twitter dismantled its internal structures of fact checking, trust-worthy identities, and moderation of the worst excesses of hatred. With such poor leadership, it felt that now was the time to be more active as a Christian. In other words, as the darkness of twitter grew, I wanted to ‘let my little light shine’. I spent increasing time trying to be publicly cheerful.

This all changed when twitter started funding hate speech.

Twitter’s algorithm creates a feedback loop on contentious posts. The more contentious a post is, the more people engage with it, and the more the algorithm promotes the post to others. The most contentious posts tend to be divisive oversimplifications that demonise entire groups of people. Twitter became a place that paid people to post hate-for-likes. There was a spate of antisemitic, racist, and misogynistic posts which generated a lot of attention, and I felt sick to think I was part of a system that actively rewarded this type of material.

Social media companies talk of themselves as platforms; places where content is shared. They distance themselves from the content, while at the same time making money from the advertising revenue that comes from massive engagement with the content. No one goes to twitter for the User Interface. Twitter is nothing without content. Twitter is nothing without accounts. Advertisers go where the market is, and twitter sells itself as the place where people are. This advertising revenue is then used to fund content creators who drive engagement – and the algorithm model encourages hate-speech.

This was the realisation that took me away from twitter. That my participation wasn’t a light shining in a dark place; I was just another financial performance indicator for twitter’s investors. I could post what I like to my friends in my echo-chamber, but my presence (along with the millions of others) drove revenue that paid out to those who tweeted hate.

So I left. I tried Mastodon. I tried Threads. I ended up on Bluesky. None of them gave me the buzz that came from engagement via twitter*. I miss the posts of those I followed… but, I reminded myself:

Nothing I have to say is important enough to fund hatred.

[* edit/update: Bluesky has turned out to be so much better than twitter ever was, I enjoy hundreds of genuine conversations – so much more than I ever experienced on twitter. Twitter was busy with everyone shouting, Bluesky is busy with everyone interacting. 5 stars: highly recommended!]

Screenshot of Father Hilarious bluesky profile.