Goodbye Twitter

I will no longer generate revenue for the censorship wing of the censorship party

It’s taken longer than it should have, but I am finally ready to say goodbye to what was once my favorite social media platform and news-gathering service: Twitter. I will be leaving Twitter for the same reason that I left Facebook: I refuse to allow a company to profit off of the data that I put into their platform while they tell me what content I can see on their platform.

The final straw for me, when I first began to think that Twitter was finally more trouble than it was worth, though my thoughts had increasingly been moving in that direction for years, was the censoring of The New York Post’s story on President Biden’s son, Hunter, shortly before the presidential election in November. Twitter blocked The Post’s account from sending out any tweets whatsoever and blocked other users from sharing a link to the story claiming that the story was based on stolen material from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which evidently violated one of their policies.

It goes without saying that the real reason the story was blocked was to mitigate the harm that it could do to then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign to oust Donald Trump from the White House, and that it constitutes genuine, verifiable election interference—which so many people seemed to be so concerned about in the four years prior only to turn on a dime and cheer when it was done on their behalf.

That the story was correct and that Hunter Biden is currently under investigation by the U.S. government for his business dealings doesn’t matter because the goal was to help Joe Biden win the election, which he did. Any claims that there was concern over the source of the story, or that the story was actually some kind of disinformation plot designed to harm Biden and ensure Trump’s reelection were merely excuses designed to cover up the obvious corruption in blocking a factually true, newsworthy story to help a particular candidate win their election.

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The overall point, however, is that Twitter has now taken it upon themselves to decide what their users can see on their timelines and who they can follow, all the while enriching themselves off the ads that they shove down the throats of their users.

No thank you.

Substack will, at least for the foreseeable future, be my one and only home on the internet. While I will not delete my Twitter account I will no longer be posting from it, and will no longer keep up with the accounts that I follow. It is possible that I will one day actively participate on some other social media platforms, I do have accounts on Locals, thinkspot, and a few others, but for now I need a break from social media in general.

Not only is Twitter, in particular, bad for our politics, but I firmly believe that social media in general is bad for our mental health and there is ongoing research that indicates this. So, for now, at least, I need a break. I need to operate more in the real world away from the poison and negativity that permeates social media, including from me.

Writing longform blog posts makes me think much harder about a subject than does firing off short tweets that come to me in the moment. Maybe that means I’m simply not responsible enough to use social media, or maybe none of us are, really. All I know is that I’m much more proud of the content from my blogs than I am from the content from my Twitter, so I’m choosing to focus my energy there with this Substack.

I would urge anyone who likes my content on Twitter to subscribe to this blog, 45, as I am not looking to simply scream into the void here. I’m still looking for interaction with what I’m saying, I just want that interaction to be more thought out than a platform like Twitter typically engenders and I think Substack is the place for that.

So, please, share and subscribe to this blog, and I look forward to some interesting discussions here very soon.