Time to break the Twitter habit

🔊 Deleting journalists, deleting their years of reporting, deleting audio he didn't like, banning Mastodon links. Even Musk says Twitter is bad for your mental health.

• 🔊AUDIO: Time to break the Twitter habit

• 15% annual subscription discount forever here

• My new Mastodon account here

• Update: Some more notes on Twitter and Musk

I was wondering back in November about what would happen to the news if Musk broke Twitter. For a decade or longer, the site was the best place to get informed about the latest news on just about any topic you care to mention, mostly because it was full of journalists posting their stories and information and quotes, and full of people posting original testimony and images and analysis on an enormous range of global topics, often in real-time.

I have been thinking about strategies and formats and sites and distribution all year. Something strange already seemed to be happening on Twitter compared to previous years. Maybe it was me, maybe it was you, maybe it was the site, maybe it was the pandemic or some complex broader set of cultural or economic shifts that no one could really put their finger on.

My interactions on Twitter over the previous year had gone from the normal 10% of insults and problems to 90% insults and problems, with increasing amounts of xenophobia. Now the year is coming to an end again (Merry Xmas! 🎅) and it’s time to take some more decisions.

Old Twitter, with all its faults, is gone. Elon Twitter is what it is. Cult of Musk is doing what it is doing. He paid all of that money for it and he is now arbitrarily setting the rules in a Trumpian, MAGA-like, populist, even proto-fascist (if you read some books on the core of historic fascism) or anti-liberal manner.

His arbitrary authoritarian treatment of journalists this week, the deletion of a Twitter Space he was in and Twitter Spaces altogether because some journalists asked him some questions he didn’t like, or his banning of all links to Mastodon, in tweets or in profiles, fit into that worldview and seem not acceptable to me. It breaks some underlying fundamental thing.

Twitter is no longer an automatic place to do journalism.

It changed my mind on setting up a Mastodon account (follow here). For a decade, Twitter has been my habitual place to post new stories, information, quotes, ideas, thoughts and analysis, as it has been for thousands of other journalists around the world. Didn’t even have to think about it. Just put it all on Twitter, because that was where it was all happening. Not any more.

The attitude and direction Musk has taken also create problems for the historical record in the global public sphere, actual first-draft of history material for thousands of stories over the past 10 years, as well as the new collaborative investigative efforts like Bellingcat that had never existed before.

When Musk deletes a journalist arbitrarily—and he has just proven he will do so on a whim—he also deletes their years of reporting, fact-checking and analysis on all of their stories, not just the one that angered Elon, and their readers’ access to it. He destroys a reporter, he destroys that reporter’s reporting, and he destroys that reporter’s social graph of relationships with his thousands or hundreds of thousands of readers who voluntarily decided to follow and be informed by that reporter.

I can’t control what a billionaire populist does from the other side of the planet with what has been our faulty but functional global public sphere for the past decade but I can control where I spend my time, what I pay attention to, and how frequently I do so. Twitter is now Just Another Site. I won’t delete my account there but I will stop using it constantly. The app is gone from my phone.

I will keep writing about Spain for you here on the Substack, where you have also shown to me over the past three months that we can still create real value together, so sign up for the emails and get your paid subscription. A fascinating 2023 Spain awaits us with all of the polarised elections. Let’s give Mastodon a go for shorter things. Thank you, as always, for reading.