Twitter (Officially now X, but I’ll be using Twitter for the sake of clarity) is an abomination of a website that should be abandoned and left to rot and burn, empty and alone.
This is a very extreme opinion, I know. But I hold it, nevertheless. And I have a few reasons why I feel this way.
One is the (tenuous term) radicalization of Twitter towards political parties. Because Twitter heavily relies on the idea of posting whatever you want (as long as it doesn’t insult, threaten or otherwise bother a given business that Twitter likes), many politicians from several countries (but mostly the US) have taken to getting their Twitter followers riled up to listen to whatever they say.
But that’s not the focus here.
The second reason is more important – Twitter doesn’t only radicalize people politically; what it usually does is filter out their common-God-forsaken-sense. On the filter end, users, especially older users, often obsess over the concept of “free speech” and how they can “say whatever they want.” Thus, they will begin to say worse and worse things because they cling to the idea that they can’t be punished or silenced.
Well, for one, that’s not what the First Amendment says. It simply says that people have a right to free speech, not that they have the right to say whatever they want and get away with it. Being criticized or punished isn’t having your First Amendment rights broken. The First Amendment just guarantees that you can say it to begin with.
Granted, this issue can be found in basically every social media site available to Americans, albeit to a lesser degree than on Twitter. You can find people like this on Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, etc. There’s just more of them on Twitter. Since most people can generally ignore things like this, it’s not a huge issue, although it is unquestionably a downside.
The bigger problem is the lack of common decency and sense.
What social media tends to encourage is anonymity – you can say things you would never say in real life, because who’s going to stop you if they don’t know who you are?
But anonymity only goes so far. After a certain point, it seems that people just lose the ability to comprehend that the other users beyond the screen are actual people with lives.
This is most visible with the concept of “doxing” – posting private information about a person in a location where it can be accessed by the general public. While this theoretically can include car license plates, phone numbers, email addresses or names, doxing is usually most dangerous when it reveals housing information. No person with even a drop of common sense would ever do this – same with death threats.
I’ll be direct. I have never doxed a person. As such, I cannot understand how badly you must hate someone and how lacking in common sense you must be to send death threats to and leak information about another person. No one can say that this is a healthy mentality. It is extremely dangerous and must be stamped out.
And the real problem is that not only does Twitter do nothing about doxing, but its system also almost encourages people to get more extreme and lose that common sense faster. The system of Twitter works so that while you aren’t exclusively shown content by the people you follow, it does filter out minor opinions you disagree with until you are generally shown only either extremely different opinions or ones you strongly agree with. This leads people to disregard the feelings of those they don’t like or whom they generally disagree with, and often this “disregarding” can become a lot more extreme.
Consider how there have been several people who were simply driven off the platform, often for no real reason. I’ll bring up an example many may not be familiar with but is still the best example – a medium-sized YouTuber known as “JoCat,” a very unproblematic internet personality who is very actively pro-LGBTQ+. A few years ago, on April 2, 2021, he posted a joking, gender-bent version of the song “Boys” by Lizzo, swapping the concept to girls instead of men.
The joke was fairly well received not only within his community but on YouTube as a whole. Objectively, it was harmless. The parody itself is talking about how JoCat likes a variety of women, not just ones who are traditionally attractive. In fact, this is a positive message.
But once it made its way onto Twitter in December 2023, it was met with fire and fury. JoCat and his family received several death threats and were doxed several times until he publicly quit the internet.
This is not okay. This is indefensible.
And while this is a terrible story that no one deserves to be the star of, I’d like to point out that not only is this not a unique tale, but Twitter is almost universally the common thread when things like this happen. Something or someone is just fine, no controversy or public shame, until a random Twitter user posts about their dislike of them. Then, due to how the algorithm works, the site suddenly bursts into uproar over a non-issue – like posting a song parody swapping the men and women in the lyrics a song.
Because of how Twitter functions, what even a couple of people say can become trending. People who agree with an opinion or who even just jump on the bandwagon aren’t helping when they over-escalate something that was originally not a problem.
Twitter doesn’t deserve to exist if it promotes this toxic, actively dangerous environment. I’d advise all current Twitter users to abandon ship while they still can before the site becomes truly unsalvageable.
