Farewell Twitter - breaking up is hard to do

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

It looks like it is time to leave the sinking ship of the app formerly known as Twitter after almost 15 years of tweeting. Elon Musk, looking and behaving more and more like a classic James Bond villain, has succeeded in destroying a major social media channel in one year of chaotic ownership. His strategy seems to be to scare off all serious users and create a new platform, X, for right wing extremism, conspiracy theories and disinformation. In that case he has succeeded. 

However, I'm sad to leave because over the years I have made so many valuable connections on Twitter that have lead to collaboration and new friendships, as well as countless useful links, inspirational chats and moral support. I've met people on Twitter who I have then met at conferences, written articles with and formed projects with. It took me a few years of work to build up a network on Twitter. Many colleagues gave up with it because they had so few connections and didn't work out how to attract more. There was little or no interest in the platform here in Sweden back then so I reached out internationally, following educators I knew and admired and then checking who they followed. That way I built up a network of trusted sources. Then I had to find ways of getting people to follow me otherwise I'd be simply tweeting into a vacuum. I focused on sharing useful content (articles, news, threads) and using hashtags to reach as many as possible. Slowly people started following me and connections began to happen. I followed people and channels who offered useful content for my work and assumed that some of themwould find me a useful contact. I also started using Twitter to generate traffic to my blogs and that certainly helped them thrive. I remember the day one of my educational gurus retweeted one of my blog posts and I saw the sudden peak in page views - I really felt I'd made the big time! That has happened quite often since then but I still get a great feeling when a major name in my field notices what I've done. No names mentioned but I thank you all. 

I have made many exciting contacts and one in particular still makes me smile. I saw a tweet one day from a school teacher in Canada  who had seen a nice Swedish brochure about using Creative Commons licenses in school. She wondered if anyone could translate it to English. I happened to know the person who wrote the original and we very quickly created a new English version and sent it to the Canadian teacher. This then spread and was used in many schools. I then got an invitation from the teacher to meet her class on Skype one afternoon and talk about Creative Commons as well as answering the pupils' questions about life in Sweden. All that because I answered a tweet.

Then there have been all the tweetchats. I have taken part in many of these and organised many too. If you have never tried one before it goes like this. You announce a chat session in advance and a suitable hashtag. At the proposed time you send a tweet with the hashtag welcoming everyone to the tweetchat. Participants "tune in" by searching for the hashtag on Twitter or whatever app you use for it. The participants can then introduce themselves and you can make a few welcoming remarks and repeat the chat rules. The key is that the hashtag must appear on every post. Then you ask a question and wait for responses. As the answers come in you can comment on them and encourage participants to comment on each others' posts. You keep feeding the discussion until the time is up, usually after one hour. It's rather chaotic - some people find it stressful and confusing whilst others thrive. I love hosting but you end up typing almost non-stop for an hour. If you have experienced users the chat just flies along and participants share links, ideas and new perspectives. I will miss this and even if the same thing can be done on other platforms I don't really have the energy to start all over again.

As Twitter implodes into a platform called X it is time for the world's media, institutions, companies and leaders to leave and stop using it as a channel for serious dissemination and discussion. I hope that world politics will no longer be conducted on X. I'm not sure where they should move to though. Do we really trust Meta's new Threads? Is Mastodon able to become a default news source? Or is the new social media landscape too fragmented? Twitter has been an extremely powerful medium for 15 years and it is hard to understand how it could be destroyed so quickly.

Curiously, I have never really seen the dark side of Twitter. Maybe it's due to a combination of being careful who I follow and the algorithms being very effective at feeding me content that I want to see. Anyway, my feed has always been full of education content as well as increasing amounts of climate research and humanitarian posts with almost no trace of the toxic garbage that have made the platform so infamous, especially since Musk turned off all the safety controls. I'm still reluctant to completely switch off because I still get good useful content from both contacts and trusted news media. I've deleted Twitter from my mobile but haven't quite pressed the button to completely exit. Breaking up is hard to do.

PS. I have now deleted my account.