The Twitter we knew no longer exists, so I’m finally giving up on X
Dear X, finally, I’m leaving. You’ve wasted my time with otter memes and Twitter spats, but now you’ve descended into vitriol, writes Susie Alegre
Dear X, finally, I’m leaving. It’s complicated – too much nuance for a tweet and, perhaps because my attention span is shot after six years of scrolling, I don’t have the patience for a long thread. But the main reasons are already set out in my book “Freedom to Think” – I’m just finally taking action.
Freedom of thought is, in some ways, the shadow side of freedom of expression. It allows us to keep what we are thinking private. But social media platforms like X are designed to make us let our guard down, so that we expose ourselves more in public than we might really want to. Whether it’s tweeting about clubbing a fox in a kimono for clout, or liking a cat video that turns out to have been posted by a troll farm funded by a nefarious foreign power, X, in particular, encourages bringing your whole self naked to the town square. Most of us would never do it if we weren’t hooked on the dopamine.
Freedom of thought includes the right not to be manipulated. But there is something compulsive about doom scrolling. Despite using “monk mode” and having parental controls so high at home I can’t bypass them myself, I waste too much of my precious time surfing outrage and cuteness on my phone when I could be staring into space, thinking my own thoughts.
None of this is new. So what
has changed? Basically, it’s all just become Xitter.
When I joined Twitter, for professional reasons, I was reassured that I could auto delete to clear out my feed weekly and lock it down to private whenever I wanted. It’s not that I’ve posted something terrible, it’s just that I don’t want six years of otter memes and the digital traces of mindless distractions to be used to judge and manipulate me for time immemorial. But over the past year, those functions became payable and then, having paid for them, ceased to work.
Despite the compulsion to check it, the quality of my feed is less and less engaging. I see justified and unjustified anger screamed into the void and reams of pointless hot takes on AI hype. Whether any of it is true or generated by humans is increasingly unclear and I see less otters or #womensart. Even the targeted advertising has become more omnipresent but less relevant – there are so many reasons why I’m not going to hire a private jet no matter how many times it appears in my feed.
The ability to keep our thoughts private allows us to decide if, where, when, and how to express them. X encourages us to throw caution to the wind and share for likes. But as the world unfurling on our screens is more inflammatory, so the potential consequences of our responses are more dramatic. Social media screening is increasingly common – for work, travel, or access to services. No matter how careful you may be, you can never tell what might be inferred about you from years of benign likes and retweets.
Then there’s Grok. XAI’s novelty ChatGPT lookalike whose USP is that it has direct access to our content. This means it will harvest and regurgitate your thoughts in response to “spicy” queries with puerile humour, taking users to the places other chatbots would not go. Let that sink in. As the quality of the feed on X has dropped along with shaky security and the looming likelihood that we will all have to pay for it, for me, at least, it is just not worth it. I realise that some habits are hard to kick, and I am only human, so I can’t say for sure that I won’t be back. But for now it’s over.