Why I'm leaving Twitter...

Like an addict, I keep drifting back but this time my resolve may hold

I’m not sure how many times I have declared I am leaving Twitter (I refuse to call it ‘X’) but recent developments have pushed me over the edge and I just can’t continue in good conscience.

I have been on the platform 15 years. As an academic Twitter was hugely empowering in enabling me to connect and share my research and ideas with media, politicians, other academics across the world, and random people from all walks of life. Truly the greatest thing about Twitter at its peak was the breaking down of hierarchies and the challenging of expertise.

And Charlie Brooker’s prognosis back as early as 2013 was about right - there was something of a multi-player, multi-level game to Twitter from the very start (see 1:33:00 of the video below). Likes and retweets were like points that gave users a dopamine hit, and occasionally you’d defeat a boss-level and collect a celebrity (or pseudo-celebrity) follower.

But Twitter is no longer a level playing field. It has become a pay-for-play playground for conspiracy theorists, racists, grifters and anyone else willing to buy a blue tick or boosted by Elon Musk’s algorithms because their message aligns with his dystopian worldview.

Recent events have shown not only how the platform can be used to incite, spread hatred and mobilise disorder, but also that the current leadership of the company have no interest in tackling those problems. Moderation consistently fails to address hate speech of various forms.

By staying we are all complicit.

This is an information ecosystem that is wilfully and maliciously enabling the pollution of our information environment. It is distorting our perception of the world around us.

We shouldn’t stand for it. There is no need to stand for it.

One of the longstanding frictions for those of us who want to leave is not only losing the community and audience we have built up (those can be rebuilt elsewhere with time, I am quite confident, though may take different forms), but because government and other major organisations - who generate the content that many react to in real-time - have not yet migrated. But all major organisations should be platform-neutral. Elon Musk has made clear that nobody should be relying on Twitter for anything.

Indeed, we cannot have government relying on a platform for communications that has shown itself to be unwilling to regulate the veracity of information and has allowed and enabled hate to spiral. Citizens cannot be confident that Twitter is a place where disinformation is regulated. This is simply unthinkable especially at times of crisis.

In this context, in my view to stay would be ethically wrong. To stay is to signal that this is OK, that we can muddle through. It is also naive. We are living in a world of many malevolent actors and the blindness of Western states and societies makes us extremely vulnerable.

Maybe I will crawl back in a few weeks or months with my tail between my legs. Maybe I won’t, but the current status quo seems intolerable.

In the meantime, you can find me on BlueSky (@drjennings.bsky.social) and Threads (@prof.jennings) where I’ll be trying to post more. I’ll also try to write something on Substack a little more regularly - though have a few projects in the autumn that will keep me quite busy…

Stay safe…