The Tweet Spot

I joined Twitter on 12 February 2009. 

Just three months shy of 14 years later – quite a long time for a dog – I archived and downloaded my data, and then switched off my account in early November 2022.

Curiously enough, I also joined Facebook back in 2009. I didn’t last anywhere near as long on that particular social media platform. Yet my reasons for recently stepping away from Twitter were actually pretty similar. 

Sadly, in neither case can I claim to have been making some grand moral stand; I neither drew a line in the sand nor responded to anyone crossing it. I wouldn’t trust either Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk as far as I could throw them, but I certainly didn’t abandon either social media platform in protest—at anything.  

Tell the truth, I’d been thinking about stepping away from Twitter for at least a year. Yes, I found the platform useful in terms of work, a way of keeping informed about things and promoting my own journalistic work when I remembered to do so. But for every one part “journalism” there were increasingly at least two parts “annoyance, anger and frustration”—and my usage had dropped to a bare minimum as a result.  

That annoyance, I should point out, was increasingly focused on myself. Twitter had never struck me as home to nuance, subtlety or reasoned debate; indeed, its “succinct” nature had been one of its initial attractions, at least when compared with blogging—just shout out your thoughts to the world in as few characters as possible. So much less work!

But, increasingly, I felt it was where angry, self-entitled and opinionated idiots hung out—and I didn’t like how I could quickly start acting just like them in response.

So, there was no single big reason behind me shutting down my Twitter account; rather, just like Facebook, there had simply been a slow accumulation of small annoyances – individually insignificant, but together all too impactful – that eventually made me ask: Will I really miss this?

That said, there was a definite “last straw”: the increasingly frequent trending of “Tom Baker” on the platform’s sidebar, at least within the UK. Simply put, it’s not usually a good sign when the name of anyone in their late eighties starts “trending” on Twitter. Time and again, the relief of once again discovering that the Fourth Doctor Who actor was still very much alive never quite compensated for the initial momentary shock—thinking that a childhood hero had finally shuffled off this mortal coil.

The irony, of course, is that I now know for sure that I won’t personally hear of Tom Baker’s eventual death through Twitter. But I think I can live with that.